


Awake In The Sky

by AxolotlQueen



Category: How to Train Your Dragon (2010), Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Ableism, Alternate Universe - How to Train Your Dragon Fusion, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, Canon Disabled Character, Crossover, Dragons, Fluff, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, internalized ableism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2014-07-02
Packaged: 2018-02-04 23:07:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1796641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AxolotlQueen/pseuds/AxolotlQueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is Shatter. We like to brag we’re the last village before the end of the world, and that might even be true now. It’s not a new town, but just about every building in it is. You see, we have a little pest problem. Not the sort of pests you’re thinking about. No, we have dragons. Other people might give up. Might leave, or build a wall to try and keep them out. Not us. We’re the resistance. Or whatever. So we stay and fight. Because killing a dragon is everything around here.</p><p>Well, not all of us fight. Some of us don’t want to fight and think we might not need to. And some of us want to fight but aren’t allowed. But someday we’ll get out there too.</p><p>(How To Train Your Dragon au with Newt and Hermann as the main characters.)</p><p>Warning: Most likely, I'm not going to end up finishing this. I apologize deeply.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In which Newt and Hermann need to stop...all of this.

**Author's Note:**

> I've seen How To Train Your Dragon 2, and that was what inspired me to write this, but it's based on the first movie, and although there are a few references to 2, they are subtle, and there are no spoilers. I don't _think_ you need to have seen either movie to understand the plot. But if it is too confusing after all, please let me know!
> 
> I'm not done writing this yet, but I've written the next several chapters, so I'll probably update every few days. If I take too long, come scold me at my tumblr: tsundere-scientists. 
> 
> Fic title from the song "Where No One Goes," by Jonsi and John Powell. It's one of the songs from HTTYD2 soundtrack.

The horn sounding, deep and resonant enough to vibrate the bones of anyone within a square mile, wakes Newt from dreams of dragons sailing graceful and beautiful through the night sky. He sits up with a gasp, and peers out the window. It’s dark out, probably around midnight, and sure enough, he can already see the tell tale spurts of fire over the town square where the livestock is kept. Dragon attack. 

Newt is ready. He’s been waiting for this. He rolls off his bed and dresses quickly, then drops to his knees to pull his supplies out from under his bed. A precious handmade notebook and pencil, both small enough to shove into his pockets. He waits a moment longer to make sure he is the only one in the hut. Even people like his parents and uncle, who aren’t particularly aggressive or muscular, join in defending the village. There’s hardly anyone in the town that doesn’t join the fight. Even most of the teenagers contribute by doing things like putting out fires. Newt is one of the few not expected to hlep, which is, as he’s often reminded, due to him being a “tiny freak.” Whatever. At least it makes it easy for him to sneak out of the house and into the night, already alive with dragon fire and shouts. 

Newt ignores the fray in the center of the village, instead making for the hill. It’s on the edge of the village that faces into the depths of the island, far from any livestock. It’s probably not the safest place to be in a dragon attack, as a decent amount of the dragons approach the village from over the island and thus have to fly over the hill, but there’s nothing of interest there, so he’s confident none of them will actually be paying attention to it. It also provides an excellent view of the village and is rocky enough for there to be good cover and hiding places. Plus, everyone is too busy running _into_ the village to join the fight to notice one small, weird teenager (who's shit at fighting) running in the opposite direction. He has to swerve once to avoid Herc Hansen, who might give more of a shit about him being where he shouldn’t than other villagers, but other than that he makes it to the edge of the town easily and quickly finds a good place to watch the fight unfolding beneath him, lit by the fires of the attacking beasts. 

There’s some lovely variety tonight. A truly beautiful Monstrous Nightmare coated in flames. A Deadly Nadder. He only takes his eyes off the beasts before him long enough to sketch out hasty images of them in his notebook, squinting through the dark to see the pages. Then-

Then he hears a scuffling sound to his left. 

He goes still immediately, breath catching in his throat, heart stopping and then slamming into triple duty. Oh shit. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe a dragon _would_ stop at the hill. There’s the scuffling sound again, and something scraping - a claw on a rock, perhaps - And-

A familiar voice hissing, “Oh, fuck!”

That’s not a dragon. 

Newt looks to his left, then jumps to his feet and takes a few strides in that direction. He has to go around a large rock that was blocking his view, and beyond that is a clear, flat area currently occupied by a skinny, somewhat disheveled boy, kneeling awkwardly on the ground and setting up some sort of strange mechanism. 

“Hermann?” Newt says disbelievingly. 

The other boy jumps and looks at Newt, wide-eyed. He relaxes when he sees who it is, then bristles defensively. “Newton? What the hell are you doing out here- No, I don’t need to ask, you’re observing your precious dragons again. Really, I’d thought you’d have learned your lesson after last time. I see your eyebrows have finally grown back.” 

“That’s rich from you!” Newt says, only barely remembering not to shout. “What the hell are you doing here? Is that- Please don’t tell me that’s one of your stupid inventions!”

“It’s not stupid!” he snaps, and goes back to fiddling with it. It appears to be somewhat like a crossbow, but able to fold up into small pieces, and set up on a tripod that stabilizes it against the ground. The projectile he is loading looks nothing like an arrow. Instead of having it face toward the village, it’s pointed at the direction the dragons are coming from; toward the depths of the island, which are forested and inhabited only by dragons and other wild animals.

“You’re not supposed to be out here!” Newt says, taking a step toward him.

“Neither are you!”

“Yeah, but I don’t give a fuck about rules, and you do! What if someone catches you here! Or worse, what if a dragon tries to attack, what will you do? It’s not like _you_ can outrun a dragon!”

He sends Newt a truly furious glare at that. Newt feels the tiniest bit guilty.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, sitting down on the dirt on the other side of his weird machine. Newt doesn't think he's seen this particular creation before, but he has often caught glimpses of Hermann drawing sketches of various inventions over the past few years, and this looks as peculiar as all of them. “But is playing with some stupid invention of yours really worth taking the chance? I know how much you hate _risks_.” The last part is accompanied with a bit of a sneer.

“I’m not taking a chance,” Hermann says fiercely. “This is going to work, I’m certain of it. I’ve done all my calculations at least twice, and I’ve tested it, and it’s going to work, and I’m going to kill a dragon, and then no one will think I’m useless anymore!”

Newt leaps back to his feet. “You’re going to kill a dragon?!” he shrieks. 

“Shut up!” Hermann hisses. 

“Have you listened to _anything_ I’ve ever told you-”

“No-”

“They’re not bad, they’re just wild, we don’t need to kill them-”

“Just because you _love_ them-”

“Shut up, I don’t love them!” 

“You do so-” he starts to retort, then audibly sucks in a breath and says, “Oh gods. There’s one.” 

Newt, heart suddenly thumping, looks in the direction Hermann is facing toward. And there, flying toward them, low over the woody, rolling hills of the island, is a medium sized dragon - no doubt still fierce despite its size - with long, brightly colored wings. It’s not far off now, not far at all, and its current path will cause it to fly directly over the two of them. Newt’s brain, confronted with the reality of a dragon heading directly at him, fills up with buzzing, incomprehensible fear, so that he freezes in place, unable to decide if he should run or hide or try to fight. Unable to think at all.

Hermann, sounding perfectly calm other than the way his voice slightly shakes, says, “That one will be perfect.”

“Don’t!” Newt squeaks, shrill with fear. 

“It’ll work, I swear- Just one more second, I need it to be closer in order to kill it-”

“ _Hermann_ -” he says desperately, and dives at him, trying to knock his hand off the trigger, or maybe trying to collapse the machine entirely. Instead, he jars Hermann hard enough that his hand reflexively squeezes. 

There’s a twanging sound. Hermann swears. Something rushes past Newt’s face. The dragon shrieks. They both look at it-

Something has hit it, but not directly; it's a tangential strike that tangles in its wings. It seems to jerk in the air, and is flung backward, unexpectedly colliding with what Newt at first thinks is a slightly lighter patch of sky. Then, with a shocked jolt, he realizes it is another dragon, right behind the first one, so dark as to be almost invisible against the night sky, only noticeable when the first dragon collides with it. They both make an unholy sound, shrieking at each other and beating their wings, now tangled together by whatever Hermann’s projectile was - some sort of net, Newt thinks - and go careening off into the night, trying to fly but losing altitude all the while, until eventually they fall out of the sky, down somewhere into the middle of the island. 

“F-fuck-” Newt stutters. “What the fuck did you do?”

“It’s your fault!” Hermann shouts, voice high and shaking. “You made me shoot too soon- It hit inaccurately- Oh, Hel, this is all your fault, damn you!” 

“I have no doubt the fault belongs to both of you,” an icy, accented voice says from behind Newt. He stiffens. Hermann goes dead white. 

“D-dad. I-”

“I have no interest in your excuses or your explanations, Hermann,” Lars says, striding past Newt to stand before his son. “I understand perfectly. You were meant to stay inside, where you would not be in anyone’s way, and instead you snuck out to play with one of your stupid toys-” At this he aims a kick at Hermann’s contraption, hard enough that it shudders and falls apart, Hermann flinching away at the gesture, “-and have nearly gotten yourself and your idiotic friend killed, and done gods’ knows what to some dragon. Let’s just hope you haven’t provoked the damn things.” 

Newt has an irrational urge to protest that they are not friends - not anymore - but for once manages to keep his mouth shut. 

“Now get up. We’re going home. You too, Newton,” he spits. 

They may not be friends, but Newt still feels a painful burst of empathy when Hermann tries to stand up and loses his balance as soon as he puts any weight on his bad leg. Newt swallows nervously, casts a glance at Lars, then steps toward Hermann and silently holds out a hand. Hermann flushes dully, but takes Newt's hand and hauls himself up into a standing position. Lars watches all this with zero expression on his cold face. When they are both standing, he pivots and strides back to the village, a hand resting on the hilt of his sword, presumably in case a dragon tries to attack them on the way back, although Newt doubts even a dragon would dare confront Lars when he's this obviously pissed. Lars doesn’t look back to see if the two boys follow. 

Hermann casts one longing look at his shattered machine, then walks after his father. Newt follows behind. They don’t speak, not even saying good-bye when Lars deposits each of them in the appropriate doorway - only a few meters apart from each other, and Newt is often convinced his biggest misfortune in life is being neighbors to Hermann Gottlieb - but the mutual air of resentment and recrimination directed both at each other and at Hermann’s father doesn’t need to be spoken to be perfectly clear. Hermann might as well be shouting, “this is your fault!” in his ears. Newt is shouting it right back. 

~~*~~

Hermann’s punishment for being out of the house during a dragon raid is fairly typical. Not that he’s prone to being out of the house when dragons are flying overhead trying to kill everyone- well, that depends on your definition of prone. It’s happened once before. Hermann doesn’t think that makes it a repeat performance. Newt has been caught out of doors during dragon raids at least five times, and Hermann knows for a fact there are two other times beyond that, and suspects there are several other instances. Twice is hardly _often_ , not in comparison to that. 

But, anyway, although this has only happened once before and thus there is not an established punishment for it, there is, in general, established punishments for everyday bad behavior, and the punishment for this follows the pattern of that.

A lecture, first of all, starting early the morning after and going on for a long while. Hermann stands silently before his father and takes it all. He’s thinking, for some reason, how if Newton were in his position right now he would make loads of snarky comments - “The villagers could use a little less feeding, don’t you think?” when Lars says ensuring there's food for the winter is more important than this, that sort of stupid commentary - and not at all take it seriously. But Hermann does, and Lars doesn’t like excuses or talking back, so Hermann stares wordlessly at the floor until Lars barks, “ _Look_ at me when I’m talking to you, Hermann!” and then Hermann forces himself to look up into his father’s familiar disappointed face as he tells Hermann that he can’t just do things like this, he is forbidden from leaving the house during attacks because every time he does, something goes wrong, and Lars has more important things to worry about than his errant son who just can’t seem to be like everyone else…

It always the same. He may scold Hermann for different things each time, but the basis of it is always the same. Why can't you just be like everyone else? Why are you such a disappointment? 

After that are chores. There’s cleaning, which Hermann doesn’t mind so much other than scrubbing the floors, which hurts his knee. Not that he would ever dream of complaining. There’s also polishing all of his father’s armor, which is less pleasant. The fumes make him go lightheaded. He also has to do the cooking for the next two weeks, which is really a punishment for everyone, because he isn’t good at it. Baking, he can handle, but his cooking is always bland and burnt. And there are various other household chores too. Nothing he enjoys, but nothing that is overly unpleasant or unusual.

Then there’s the silent treatment. This, Lars informs him, is not for the actual sneaking out, but for the time that Lars was forced to take away from fighting to look for him after being informed by Dietrich - the bloody sneak - that Hermann was out of the house. That, Lars lectures in a superior tone, is the worst offense, because it doesn’t just endanger him, but everyone. So, the old silent treatment, enacted whenever one of his children does something he considers particularly heinous, wherein he instructs all of the unpunished children to not speak to the child in trouble for a set amount of time. For this particular infraction, it’s four days of silence. 

Hermann always pretends that he doesn’t mind the silent treatment, but he does. It’s all right at first, almost peaceful, to be spared anyone speaking to him. His siblings are all annoying anyway, and most of the time when the three communicate with each other, it’s all bickering. It ought to be nice to be freed of that. But somehow, as time passes, it always wears on him, to be so utterly ignored. Once, when Lars was particularly furious with Hermann, the silent treatment lasted for seven days, and by the end of it he felt as if he was starting to cease to exist. 

Four days is bad, but he’s very angry too, and that always helps him last out the silent treatment, as it makes him not want to speak to anyone either. 

The worst part, actually, is probably that Lars forbids him to leave the house for a whole day. No doubt he would forbid it for longer if he could, but Hermann is old enough to have chores around the village that he has to perform, so instead Lars restricts him to the house for one day and gives him a curfew for the foreseeable future, to always be home by the time it began to be dark. 

He steams for the day that he is trapped inside, thinking angry thoughts about his father and his ruined invention and his wasted efforts and blasted Newton, but most of all about those dragons. He fumes his way through all the chores he has to do that day - which is a considerable amount and keeps him busy the whole day - and sulks through dinner and wonders where those dragons went down and if they are still there and this is _all_ Newton’s fault. Trapped as he is in a bubble of silence, he is left alone to consider these thoughts. After dinner, he escapes to the room he shares with his sister, which is fortuitously abandoned. She must be spending the evening with that obnoxious boy that she’s interested in. 

Since he’s alone, it’s safe to pull out his precious notebook, and the tattered map that he...found. Not found, exactly. It’s ripped, so his father was going to throw it away, and instead of burning it as kindling as Hermann was supposed to, he pocketed it. It’s even more worn out now, lightly scribbled on by Hermann. He sketched a bad version of it in his notebook a few months ago to write on instead of the actual map, in the hopes of preserving the original longer, but the map will still probably be ruined beyond all use in another half a year or so. 

If his father knew that Hermann had either of these things, he’d be angry, especially if he were to figure out what Hermann was doing with them. It’s unfair, really, because he’s trying to be helpful. Everything in his notebook is ideas on how to better fight the dragons, and every mark on the map is an attempt to track the dragons’ patterns to see if he can figure out where they've been coming from. But Lars is so convinced that Hermann is absolutely useless that he would never listen to any of that. Is so sure that just because Hermann can’t fight - can’t run, can’t properly wield a sword or spear or ax, can’t lift anything heavy - he must be worthless in every aspect of his being, including his brain, and therefore must be a complete idiot. 

It’s not fair. He isn’t useless. He isn’t worthless. He isn’t stupid. He just has to fight differently from everyone else, that’s all, why won’t Lars just _listen_ \- If he could just kill a dragon, then Lars would see that he could be useful, he could be a good son. Lars would listen. 

So, Hermann grits his teeth and carefully examines his map of the island and it’s surrounding land masses. He thinks the dragons come from the west, but that isn’t significant today. The two dragons from yesterday, the ones that he hit - and if Newt just hadn’t jolted him, he would have shot more accurately, when the dragon was closer, and he’s sure that if he had hit it close range it would have been a shot with enough force to immediately ground the dragon and hopefully kill it - landed somewhere on the island. Hermann tried to mentally note the location as carefully as he could last night. It was to the right of a rocky outcropping...which, looking at his map, seems as if it could match _this_ location...Yes, that could definitely be it. About a mile away, maybe a little more. He pinches his lips, considering if he can walk that. Depends on how even the ground is. He tires much more quickly than someone without his particular disability, but he still has fairly good endurance. It’s going through the wild and uneven landscape that is more of a problem. He can climb simple structures - ladders are downright easy, for example - but a sloping hill is much harder, especially if it’s covered in undergrowth. 

Well, he won’t know unless he tries, he decides. And he’s in trouble enough already, so he might as well try. So the day after that, when he is at last left alone, free of chores and ignored by all in his family, he gathers up the things he thinks he might need. His sketchy map, a water skin, the cane he uses when he has to walk long distances (or on the days where his leg, for no apparent reason, is so weak or painful that he needs the help), and one other thing. 

This is the real reason he needed to be alone in the house. If he only wanted to sneak off, he wouldn’t mind if his siblings were around. They’re ignoring him anyway, and have no reason to suspect he’s going somewhere he shouldn’t. But they _would_ notice him going through his father’s private supply of weapons and armor. They would question him taking the long, sharp hunting knife, the one that he knows his father has killed more than one dragon with, the one that he has had since before he came to Shatter. Hermann might be more subtle with a different knife, and if his father notices him taking this one, he’ll certainly get into trouble. But it _has_ to be this one. It has to. So he carefully ties the sheath to his belt, and then sets out, glancing around to make sure no one is looking before he crosses the boundary of the village and heads in what is, according to his map, the correct direction towards the rocky outcropping he saw last night. 

He still might be able to kill a dragon and prove himself. Two would be even better.


	2. In which there be dragons (and back-story)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Currently, I'm planning to update every three days. Optimally, chapter three will be up on the 22nd. 
> 
> (also I'm super pleased with my dragons okay so I hope you guys like them)

Newt obediently stays inside all of the day after he and Hermann are caught by Lars, even sitting kind of still through his father’s half-assed lectures and trying to not talk back too much. He doesn’t entirely succeed, but Odin knows he tries. Jacob is too lenient to lecture properly anyway, and ever since that time three years ago that Lars caught Newt sneaking tobacco - and trying to convince Hermann to join him, but Lars didn’t need to know that part - and gave him the lecture of his life, Jacob has seemed positively gentle in comparison. It’s probably not a fair comparison. No one seems scary when put next to Lars the Frozen, Lars the Survivor, Lars the Very Grumpy and Judgmental Asshole. (Okay, only Newt calls him that last one. But it fits.)

But as soon as Jacob leaves Newt alone the next day, he drops all pretence of being repentant. The door has barely swung shut before he is pulling out his notebook, pencil, the small knife he got for his last birthday, a canteen, and a light sweater. He glances out the door to make sure Jacob is out of sight, and then he makes a beeline to the same hill he was caught on the other day. 

He scales the hill to the flat part where he found Hermann and his invention, thinking as he goes that he understands now why Hermann went here. Not only is it flat, it’s also easy to climb up to. He pauses there at the top of the hill, scanning the layout of the island, trying to remember where the dragons went down. The broken remnants of Hermann’s invention are still lying in a crumpled heap and Newt spares it a pitying glance - if Hermann were to ask, he’d say his inventions were dumb, but really he respects the amount of effort Hermann puts into things like that - before turning to face the island, spread out before him in a large, ragged diamond shape, rising up to a peak at the far end.

Everything looks different in broad daylight. He thought he’d remember, but now he can’t see any of the things that stood out to him that night. He’s cursing under his breath, wondering if he should just head in the general direction and hope for the best or maybe set up some sort of grid pattern to use to search, when something catches his attention. A few meters ahead of him, right at the edge of where the cleared fields of the village ends and the forest starts, is a moving figure, someone short and skinny and...leaning on a stick. No, a cane.

Oh, of course. That idiot. Damn him. 

Newt takes off running, skidding down the hill and sprinting through the fields. He’s going fast enough, and Hermann is probably going slow enough, that he catches up with him before he gets too far into the forest, bursting through a bush to emerge onto a half-overgrown trail only a few feet behind Hermann. He obviously hears Newt coming - Newt wasn’t trying to be quiet - and swivels, brandishing his cane and glaring furiously. He doesn’t relax when he sees that it’s only Newt; in fact, he looks angrier. 

“What are you doing out here?” he snaps.

“Probably the same as you,” Newt says breathlessly, coming to a stop next to him. “Looking for those dragons?”

“None of your business,” he says, doing that annoying thing he does where he half turns his face away and tilts it up so that he can look down his nose at Newt. It used to just look really stupid, but ever since he finally outstripped Newt in height, it has had more of an effect than it used to. 

(And fuck, it’s so unfair that he’s turning out to be taller than Newt. He was shorter than him for years, which was the only thing saving Newt from being the shortest of their age group, and now even Hermann is going to be taller than him. Maybe really taller. He’s got at least an inch or two on Newt already, and he doesn’t seem to be done growing, unlike Newt. Bastard.)

“Will it be my business when they try to eat you? Or if you fall down some hill out here and break your neck?” 

“Fuck you,” he spits, bristling. 

“And anyway, I want to study those dragons! And you- _You_ wouldn’t come out here if you didn’t know where to find them, or at least think you know. So I don’t care if you don’t want me around, I’m gonna follow you! And not even try to save you if get eaten!” 

Hermann glares at him for several furious seconds, then seems to decide there isn’t anything he can do about it, and growls, “Fine! But you better not stop me, Geiszler!” and starts to stomp off.

“Stop you from what-” Newt starts to ask, following after him, then exhales angrily when he realizes what he means. “Dude, of course I’m going to try and stop you from killing them. Obviously. I mean, entirely disregarding that it’s _wrong_ and a serious waste of an opportunity to get to know them better, it’s also a really stupid idea. They’d definitely destroy you. You wouldn’t be much more than a mouthful to a Monstrous Nightmare, you know-”

“You’d be even less than a mouthful,” Hermann mutters snidely. 

“Wow, rude,” Newt snaps, and gives up on talking to him. There’s no point. He’s a stubborn idiot, and he’s going to get eaten by a dragon, and Newt doesn’t care. Whatever. He doesn’t give a single fuck about Hermann Gottlieb. 

But when, after about forty more minutes of trekking through the woods in stubborn silence, the path disappearing after about twenty minutes, he notices that Hermann is lagging behind him and breathing hard, with occasional gasps that sound like they have less to do with intaking air and more to do with pain, and that he seems to be leaning much more heavily on his walking stick and limping harder than he usually does, Newt stops and says, “Let’s take a break.”

“I-if you insist,” he says - he’s so goddamn stubborn - and sinks gratefully to the ground, leaning against a tree and stretching his legs out before him. Newt sits too, on a root upthrust from the ground, and takes a long drink from the canteen that he is glad that he thought to bring. He holds it out to Hermann, who doesn’t even notice it, let alone take it. Hermann’s eyes are shut, and he’s massaging at the hip of his bad leg with a pained expression. 

“Herms, If it hurts, you should have said, we could have stopped sooner.”

“It’s fine,” he snaps, even though it’s pretty obvious he’s in pain. “And don’t call me that.”

Newt sighs. He’s utterly used to this behavior from Hermann. He’s been like this for years now. When he was little and he’d get sick, he wouldn’t ever tell anyone and would try to act normal until someone noticed and forced him to stop. It’s a Gottlieb family trait. Everyone in the village is used to it from him and his family; it’s still annoying.

Hermann’s leg has always been bad. He was born with his right leg slightly twisted in the socket so that he has a permanent limp, and to top it off, he was often sick and frail as a child which lead to him being a tiny, weak thing. Newt was a small kid too, but even he was bigger than Hermann and usually heavier in weight. It wasn’t until Hermann was about ten or so that he started to have consistently good health, and then he began to catch up to the other children, in height at least. He’s still a total beanpole. 

Newt’s mother is of the opinion that Hermann’s ill health and limp was due to the...unusual circumstances of his mother’s pregnancy and his birth. And Mom always dramatically pauses before “unusual,” because she can’t resist giving a story some flair. Then she proceeds to tell the whole thing properly. Newt must have heard it a hundred times by now and Hermann nearly as many. Sometimes when they were little and Lars was off with the other warriors of the village to look for the dragon nest, and Hermann was sick again, he’d stay at Newt’s mother’s house with Newt, and she would tell them the story before putting them to bed. (And sometimes, usually when Hermann was especially sick or Lars had been away for a while, he would cry and turn his face away so that they couldn’t see he was crying, and Newt always pretends that he didn’t ever notice.)

As Monica tells it, Lars and Lacy just showed up one day, washing ashore a little north of Shatter in a tattered boat, almost out of food and water, Lars injured and unconscious, Lacy very pregnant and clearly unwell. They had two young children with them, a boy of five and a girl of three, in slightly better condition than their parents. 

Lars was not an unfamiliar face to the villagers of Shatter. There had been another town, called Gottlieb, on an island east of here, full of fierce warriors. They spoke with an accent - Hermann, despite having lived here his whole life, has a trace of it, probably from his father - and had odd names and odd traditions, but other than that were not so very different from Shatter. The two towns had an uneasy truce. Sometimes they traded, sometimes they fought. The inhabitants of Shatter recognized Lars from both of those, a brave warrior and a cunning trader. In the condition he was in, with children and with a woman also in no shape to fight, no one felt threatened. This was obviously no attack. Without argument, he and his family were taken back to the village to be helped. His wife was too unwell to give much of a coherent explanation, only mentioning that their village had been attacked, before collapsing. 

She started labor not long after, even though it was clear she wasn’t yet at term. It was a long and difficult birth, and by the time Lars was roused back to consciousness, he had a very small, very sick infant son, and no wife. 

The story Lars told to explain their arrival was harrowing. A few weeks ago, their village had been attacked by dragons. Not so uncommon an event in this area. But this attack was different, more vicious than any preceding. The whole town caught fire. Lars was barely able to get his wife and children out. The survivors scattered. The town had a plan for if something like this were to happen; the survivors were to meet at another island a day’s sail north. But when Lars and his family tried to make it there, everything that could have gone wrong did. They were attacked again, by only one dragon this time, but a fierce enough fight to injure Lars. The wound became infected. (He still has a ferocious scar.) Then a storm arose, so that they completely lost their way. They drifted helplessly for days. They did not once encounter any other survivors. It was the merest coincidence that they found their way to Shatter. 

An expedition was sent out to Gottlieb to see what condition the town was in, or if there were any survivors to be found. They returned a few days later, grim faced, and reported that the town was utterly in ruins, and there was no one to be found at the meeting place. Gottlieb was no more.

Lars and his surviving family members had no where to go. No one questioned that they would stay at Shatter from then on. The folks of Shatter were not one to hold grudges - at least, not against humans - and indeed were glad to welcome such a renowned fighter into their town, even if he was different from the sort of folk they were used to.

No one expected the premature baby to live more than a day or too. After a pregnancy like that, it was not shocking that the child was ill and weak, or born a little wrong, with his right leg twisted as it was. He would have been in poor shape even if he had been born a month later as he ought to have been. Everyone pitied Lars, losing his home and wife and child in one stroke.

But days went by and then weeks, and still the child struggled valiantly on. Newt’s mother usually paused here in the story to say, with rare gentleness, “‘A fighter, like his father,’ that’s what people said.” If Hermann wasn’t crying at this point, he usually managed to summon up a weak smile. If he was crying, then he usually sobbed. 

By the time Newt was born, about seven months later, most people had stopped expecting the child to die. He hadn’t been named yet, as it was considered bad luck to name a baby that was in ill health, but around the same time that Newt was named, Lars also named his son. Hermann. A name of his people. As last name for the child and for his other two children, and for himself also, he took the name Gottlieb so that none of them would forget their lost village. 

This was where the story usually ended, and Monica would hurry the two of them into the bed, big enough that the two small children usually shared. Newt often complained about that. Hermann always had cold feet and hands. “You kick! And drool!” Hermann would retort. And, yes, alright, maybe that was why Newt always complained. Because it always made Hermann angry. Being angry was better than being sad, and the story of how his family came to Shatter always made Hermann sad, even if he didn’t cry. Newt hated it when Hermann was sad.

It’s funny how that used to matter. Newt forgets sometimes that they were such good friends when they were very little, always together. Both were small for their age, and where Hermann couldn’t participate in rough games due to his health, Newt couldn’t due to just generally lacking all athletic talent. So they often got left out of the other kid’s games and instead spent time together. Hermann was sweet as a kid, a shy, quiet little thing, although he could really chatter away to people he was comfortable with. Jacob said that between the two of them, he could never get any peace. 

But that, of course, was when they were kids. They drifted apart as they got older, which is of course perfectly natural and not anything that Newt cares about or regrets. Who’d want to be friends with Hermann anyway? He started getting sick less and less often as he aged, which was good, except that he also got stubborner. His shyness has turned into unfriendliness. He always thinks he’s right about everything, and he only cares about being right and about knowing that. He always follows the rules, and where is the fun in that? They two _had_ been prone to bickering before, even when they were inseparable as kids. Newt can’t count the amount of times they made each cry as little kids. But as they got older it seemed like _all_ they did was argue. Because Hermann is a jerk. An uptight, rude jerk. Who is obsessed with proving himself to his father, and who hates dragons, and thus for both of those reasons really wants to kill a dragon, which is the most important part. 

Especially because hating dragons means that he definitely hates Newt for thinking they are beautiful. 

Around the time they turned eleven or twelve, that became all they talked about - fought about - and then...then they started to not talk about it. Or anything at all. By the time they were thirteen or so, their relationship was mostly glaring and ignoring each other, punctuated by a few arguments. It’s been at least three or four years now since the two of them were friends.

Plus in the past few months, there’s something else too, something that he would swear has changed in Hermann, but he can’t identify what exactly it is. Whatever it is, it often makes him feel sort of awkward around Hermann, uncomfortable and a little hot and like he can’t think properly. What is it? Something in his face, maybe...That familiar face, but different now, all sharp angles that once made him look incredibly bony and weird but now that he is older has begun to come together in a way that is-

Hermann opens his eyes, catching Newt’s gaze. “What?” he says sharply.

Newt flinches back, suddenly embarrassed for a reason he can’t name. “What do you mean, what?”

“You’re staring at me!”

“I was not!”

“Yes, you _were_ -”

“You have dirt on your face,” Newt blurts out meanly. Hermann clicks his tongue angrily and swipes at his (perfectly clean) face. “You got it,” Newt lies. “Ready to go?”

Hermann stands up gingerly. “Yes. I’m ready.”

It’s only about ten minutes later that they find the dragons. 

~~*~~

Hermann’s leg and hip doesn’t hurt as bad after they rest, although he strongly suspects that he’s going to be really stiff and painful tomorrow. Dammit all. But he’s fine for now to keep continuing on through the woods, especially as the ground has flattened out. 

He glances up at the sky, wondering what time it is - useless, it’s too cloudy to see the sun - and through a break in the trees he catches a glimpse of something looming through the trees. Rocks, towering overhead, grown over with moss and patches of grass. 

“I think we’re almost there,” he murmurs, and Newt gives him a wide-eyed look, then quickly looks away again. He keeps doing that, he keeps glancing over at Hermann and then looking away. Hermann frowns. What’s his problem, why is he being so odd?

Whatever, that shouldn’t be the main worry now. 

Their main worry should be the sudden deep rut dug in the ground, fairly fresh, leading toward the jut of rocks. They exchange glances, and go even quieter, creeping forward on either side of the rut, Hermann internally cursing his inability to be graceful. He’s going to be really angry if they get killed by a dragon because his cane catches on a root on the ground, just really pissed off.

Thinking of getting killed by the dragon was a bad idea, because his mouth is suddenly dry as bone and his palms are sweating. They have to be close now. The dragon could be beyond that next tree, maybe waiting for them, maybe stalking them...He takes a deep breath and reminds himself that it could also be dead. That would be the best option. Then Newt can study the body like he wants to, because he’s a weird dragon _lover_ , and Hermann can...cut out the heart to bring to his father. Or something like that.

As it turns out, the rut does not dead end in a dragon, dead or alive. It cuts through the woods for a few meters - the dragon must have hit the ground fast to skid this far - then ends where the ground suddenly drops away into a small ravine before rising up again a distance away, higher and rockier on the other side. The jut of rock towers up on their left.

It might be more accurate to describe the ravine as a small valley, roundish in shape. The walls drop down fairly sharply on either side - a human, not Hermann, but maybe Newt, could probably climb down this side with relative ease - and cupped between the sloping walls is a decent sized grassy meadow with a small pond on the edge. There are even a few small trees growing down there. 

There’s also a dragon. 

“There it is,” Newt hisses, gripping at Hermann’s arm, as if Hermann could possibly not notice it. 

The dragon is lying at the edge of the pond, still tangled up in the net from Hermann’s weapon. (He was going to name it, but now that his father has destroyed his only prototype, it seems rather pointless to do so.) The net is caught in the wings and wrapped around one leg of the dragon, which Hermann supposes must be why the dragon hasn’t flown away. He thinks the dragon might be dead, for a moment, but then it stirs - both boys jolt anxiously - so it must still be alive. 

Hermann is surprised at how colorful the creature is, striped all over in jewel tones of red and orange and yellow, with a base color that is a sort of bluish green. It’s built like one of the little lizard creatures that Newt used to catch in the woods and bring back to show Hermann on the days when he was too sick to leave his bed, back when they were both kids, but those were usually mud colored, sometimes with yellow or red spots, whereas this is brightly colorful, like Newt’s mother’s costume jewelry. 

He’s also surprised at how big it is. It’s not even that large for a dragon, smaller than, say, a Deadly Nadder; but it’s still so huge. Its flat, wedge shaped face, framed about with odd, almost feathery fronds, is large enough to probably bite either him or Newt in half, if it so chose. 

Newt still has one hand wrapped around Hermann’s arm. Ordinarily he would shake Newt off - lately, for some reason, whenever Newt touches him, he gets an odd shock and his face goes hot, and it makes him uncomfortable - but now he appreciates the touch. It grounds him.

Hermann is shaking. 

“Oh, Herms,” Newt breathes. “Look how beautiful it is.” 

How can he say that? Hermann supposes that the colors are nice, and the face fronds are interesting, but- The creature shifts again, turning its face toward them, and Hermann can see big, slit-pupiled eyes, and a wide mouth, and glimpses of teeth. Huge, white teeth, just like in his nightmares. 

Newt doesn’t seem to notice his fear. He releases Hermann’s arm so that he can dig his notebook out of his pocket, and takes a step closer to the edge of the cliff. 

“Newton!” he whispers fiercely. “What are you doing? What if it sees you?”

“It won’t,” Newt predicts confidently; so of course that is the moment that the edge of the cliff crumbles under his feet, sending him skidding down the steep slope of the hill and into the valley. 

“Fuck!” Hermann gasps, staring at the place Newt had been only seconds ago, then dashing forward as close to the edge of the cliff as he deems safe and peering down. 

Newt is sitting on his ass at the base of the hill. He looks relatively unharmed, and Hermann lets out a relieved breath. Then sucks in a gasp again when he notices that the dragon has most certainly noticed the intrusion into the valley. It was lying on its belly, but now it rises up on its legs, standing taller than Hermann would have expected. He prays that it’s too tangled in the net to move around; a prayer that is dashed a second later when it begins slowly prowling forward. The net is caught on its neck and long wings, but has partially unraveled, so that although it cannot unfurl its wings, it can walk forward. It distinctly has a predator’s movements, slow and careful and confident. It walks on wide flat feet that end in claws, scraping on the small juts of rock that pepper the valley, and stops a meter shy of Newt.

“Newton,” Hermann hisses desperately, glancing around the edge of the cliff. It all drops away sheerly. Newt might be able to climb it, but Hermann has no confidence in his own ability to get down there without hurting himself, and even less in his ability to climb back up quickly. He unsheathes his knife but knows there is nothing he can do with it from here.“Get _out_ of there,” is all he is able to offer. 

It sounds as if Newt says, “Shh.” But surely not. He stands up slowly. Then, as Hermann watches, he does just about the most foolish thing Hermann can imagine; he takes a step toward the creature.

“Newt,” he whispers as loud as he dares. He’s positive that this time Newt says, “Shh!”

He and the dragon are face to face now, only a few steps separating them. The dragon doesn’t stand as tall as some of the dragons Hermann has seen, but the four powerfully muscled legs emerging from the lizard-like body are long enough that it stands taller than Newt, and has to lower its flat face to peer into Newt’s. Hermann presses a shaking hand to his mouth. Oh gods. He’s about to watch Newt get eaten by a dragon and it’s all his fault- 

But neither of them moves. Newt stands still, and so does the dragon, simply staring at him with its huge, golden eyes. Why is it not moving? Why is not eating Newt? Why is Newt not running for his life? And- For fuck’s sake, is he digging in his pocket? What, is he going to draw it?

No, he doesn’t pull out his notebook. Hermann now notes that is actually resting at the base of the cliff where he fell. Instead he pulls out a strip of something brown. Mutton or venison jerky, Hermann thinks. He holds it out tentatively, hands shaking. Hermann wants to say his name again, let him know that he is being _incredibly_ stupid but holds his breath instead. Best not to startle the dragon.

The dragon blinks, long and slow, and, judging from the way his nostrils flare, sniffs at the meat. Newt retracts his hand for an instant, then tosses the beef jerky up. The dragon snatches it out of the air with a terrifyingly quick jerk of his head. At the quick movement, Hermann inhales so hard it hurts his lungs. But Newt somehow still has his hands and all of his body parts after, and the beast quietly chews a few times, swallows, and returns its focus to Newt. 

“Okay,” Newt says softly. “Good. Did you like that, you beautiful creature? Much better than human, right?” The large golden eyes are focuses precisely on Newt’s face. It cocks its head, perhaps to listen better. “Okay,” Newt breathes. “Okay. Here goes. Please don’t eat me.” And he stretches out one arm again, hand empty this time, moving very slowly, and leaves it a few inches in front of the dragon’s face.

The dragon stares at it. The nostrils flare again. The face comes closer, closer, until- Until Newt’s hand is resting on its snout. 

“Oh gods,” Hermann hears himself saying faintly. 

“Wow,” Newt whispers. 

The dragon shuts its eyes and emits a low rumbling sound, and steps slightly back and lowers itself to the ground again, folding its legs underneath him. Once down, it opens its eyes and looks at Newt, at the patch of ground in front of it, back at Newt. Newt whispers, “Wow,” again in an astonished voice, and “Okay,” and goes down too, although from the way he’s shaking - from the way that Hermann feels himself - he guesses that might at least partially due to him being unable to stand any longer. The two creatures, human and dragon, are still only separated by the tiniest distance, Newt kneeling in front of the dragon’s face, reaching out to touch it again. Hermann wants to tell him to run while the beast is pacified, but...is that really what is going on? Is it just pacified, or...And Newt, idiot that he is, is now starting to tentatively rub at the dragon’s face.

Gods above, is the creature enjoying it? 

“I think it’s okay, Herms,” Newt says, in the same quiet, gentle tone he used to speak to the dragon. “I don’t think he’ll hurt me.” 

Hermann lets out a shaking breath. Idiot. He’s an idiot. But some of the tension runs out of his shoulders, and he tips his head back to stare at the sky, needing to look away for an instant as relief loosens all the muscles in his body- which is when he sees the other dragon.

Flying low over the trees, a long, black, snakelike creature with vast batlike wings and a tail that lashes side to side as it flies. It’s distinctly headed toward the valley. Hermann can see the precise moment it sees Newt. Can see it unsheathe long, glittering claws. Fold its wings, and start to dive. At Newt.

“Newt!” he screams. “Run!”

Newt starts and looks up at him. So does the dark-colored dragon, which hadn’t yet noticed him. Its tail twitches in the air and its path forward alters, flattens out. Toward Hermann.

Then it is _right there_ , far more quickly than he anticipated, paws slamming into his shoulders and knocking him to the ground hard, so that the air is knocked out of him with a whoosh. He can’t scream. His head slams into the dirt. There is a triangular face with wide-set, silvery eyes and a mouth full of teeth looming above his own. All he can see. The smell of fishy breath. Weight pinning him down. Needle sharp claws pricking his shoulders. Warmth all down his body where the dragon is suspended over him. Newt distantly shouting his name.

He can’t breathe. He’s drowning in terror. 

But he also isn’t. On one level all he can do is stare at the dragon and fall into a vast ocean of fear and disconnected thoughts. But there is also a different, still, frozen level, where he feels nothing, and is perfectly aware that he somehow kept hold of his knife through all this, and there is a dragon right above him, and if he were to stab it in the eye at just such an angle it would undoubtedly die. And he doesn’t, _he_ will undoubtedly die, and Newt probably will too. 

He grips the knife tighter and brings it up.

The dragon is staring at him. It has big eyes. Slit pupils, like all dragons, like his cat at home. The pupils are currently dilated, and the irrational level of his brain thinks of how much it looks like his cat when it wants to play. Only, instead of playfulness, there is curiosity. That’s stupid, his rational brain insists; dragons can’t be curious. But he would swear it’s examining him, waiting for him to move. 

It would be easy, to kill it. It would be right. 

Is this how his mother felt? When their village was attacked. When dragons were all about her. When all her family and friends and her home was destroyed. 

Its eyes are so bright. It cocks its head to the side and continues to stare at him.

Why isn’t it attacking? Why isn’t _he_ attacking? It just keeps looking at him. His irrational mind insists that he cannot move until it does. The pressure on his shoulders seems to be easing. His eyesight is blurring, and a tear runs down his cheek.

What will his father think if he dies like this? Will he be sad, or just disappointed?

The dragon blinks, then slowly lowers its face, and oh gods, this is it, he dies now, just stab it, you idiot, just do it - 

The dragon opens its mouth, and over sharp teeth flickers out a surprisingly long and thin tongue, rasping over his cheek, licking up one of the tears as it spills over. 

The dragon closes its eyes. Hermann lets go of the knife. It lands in the grass with a soft thump. 

In a sudden, swift movement, the dragon sits back, releasing Hermann’s shoulders, and turns around, bounding down the cliff into the valley.

~~*~~

Newt’s hardly even scared when the first dragon approaches him. He ought to be, but- He’s watched dragons from afar often enough by now that he knows what they look like when they are acting aggressive, and this slow advance forward is not it. It could be stalking him, but what would be the point of that, when there isn’t anywhere for him to go anyway? No. He isn’t afraid, because he’s sure that it isn’t about to attack him. 

And he touches it and its scales are smooth and warm and it’s just looking at him with big, unexpectedly intelligent eyes and it’s wonderful-

Then he hears Hermann shout his name, voice sounding so strange, and looks up and sees the second dragon - how could he have forgotten there were _two_ dragons - knock Hermann down and out of sight, and then he’s all at once terrified. So afraid that he can’t even move at first. His brain fills up with helpless white static and not a helpful thought to be found.

It feels like he stands there uselessly for an eternity, although it’s probably only a second or two before he pushes himself into motion, shouting Hermann’s name hoarsely and launching himself at the cliff wall. He desperately scrabbles up the uneven slope, fingertips catching painfully at rocks and tree roots to haul himself up. He’s nearly at the top when the second dragon comes swarming over the lip of hill, climbing down the wall as easily as if it was horizontal instead of near vertical. It entirely ignores Newt.

It’s hard to breathe. If it’s coming down- then that means- Hermann- Oh please no-

He manages to climb the last few feet even faster, heart drumming in his chest, fully expecting as he swings over the top to see Hermann’s mangled and bloody corpse lying before him.

Instead, there is Hermann, fully alive, sprawled on the ground and slowly sitting up. He has tears running down his face, and he’s white as snow and shaking, and there is a rip in the fabric on his right shoulder, blood welling up from a thin cut. But he’s alive. 

“Hermann!” Newt gasps, almost sick with relief. “Are you okay?”

He looks at Newt as if he hardly knows who Newt is. “I couldn’t do it,” he whispers. “I couldn’t kill it. I c-couldn’t-” There’s a knife at his side, lying on the ground. 

Newt flings himself forward to Hermann’s side and wraps his arms around his neck. He doesn’t even know if it’s a hug to comfort him or to check that he’s really alive or to thank him for not killing the dragon. Maybe all of the above. He just needs to touch him. 

Hermann is trembling. So is Newt. It suddenly hits Newt that the first dragon, the one trapped down in the pit, could have killed him in an instant. 

“Newt,” Hermann whispers against his neck. “It didn’t kill me. And that one didn’t kill you. They could have killed us but they didn’t. Why didn’t they? What does that mean?”

Newt leans back so he can look Hermann in the face. “It means,” he says quietly. “That everyone is wrong about them.”


	3. In which there is a knife

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: This chapter has extremely mild mentions of blood and Hermann having shitty self-esteem. 
> 
> I'm going to try and update on the 25th but I am not overly confident on my abilities to do that, as I have spent the last two days being busy (playing Portal) instead of writing as I meant to :)

They stay sitting at the cliff top for a long time, neither daring to move as the shock slowly wears off. Newt releases Hermann, but doesn’t move away from his side, and he’s not sure whether it’s for his comfort or Hermann’s. At last Newt ventures to say, “Your shoulder is bleeding a lot.”

He brings a hand up to the thin cut, touching the bloody line as if he hadn’t even known it was there. “Oh. Ow.” 

Neither of them thought to bring any sort of medical supplies, which seems stupid now considering that they were looking for _dragons_. The best they can do for the cut, which is bleeding harder than Newt would have expected considering that it is barely more than a line across his skin, is rinse it off and cut a length of fabric off of Hermann’s shirt to wrap around his shoulder. Hermann tries to do it himself, but the angle is so awkward that he keeps almost dropping it. Eventually Newt says, “Let me,” and takes the makeshift bandage from him. He’s not so much better at it. He’s strangely aware now of how close he is to Hermann, how Hermann could have died a moment ago, and how smooth and pale the skin of his shoulder is under Newt’s fingers, so that he rushes through the process and ties it too tight at first, making Hermann hiss in pain. “Sorry,” he apologizes, flushing, and loosens it up. He’s grateful to be able to scoot back several inches when he is done. 

“Thanks,” Hermann says, twisting his head to look at the bandage. He swallows hard. “We should be dead right now.”

“But we aren’t,” Newt responds. “Like you said, they could have killed us, and they didn’t. We were always taught that dragons-”

“Always go for the kill,” Hermann finishes. It’s a favorite saying of his father’s. 

“But they didn’t. Everyone is wrong. I think even the black one was just checking to see if you were a threat.”

“Turns out I’m not,” Hermann says bitterly, turning away. “I’m a failure after all.”

“Hermann…”

He stiffens his shoulders into a hard line and stands up. Newt is expecting him to walk off into the woods, back to town, but instead he advances carefully to the edge of the cliff, stopping a little shy of where it crumbled under Newt’s feet before - and that had been a dizzying shock, the ground suddenly falling out from under his feet - and kneeling on the ground so he can peer over the edge. Newt moves forward to join him in the same position. 

Both of the dragons are still down there, of course. They couldn’t have left without Newt and Hermann noticing, even if the one that Newt had touched wasn’t too tangled to fly. Its walked away from the bottom of the cliff to the edge of the pond. The dark one is circling around it, not in a predatory way, but as if it’s simply inspecting the first dragon. The dark dragon is longer than the colorful one, snakelike where the first dragon is shaped more like a lizard or perhaps a salamander, but the colorful dragon stands taller and is more solidly built. Newt reaches into his pocket to grab his notebook, but it isn’t there.

Of course not. Its still sitting at the base of the cliff where he dropped it when he fell. Or, rather, skidded down the cliff wall, which is sloped enough that he didn’t simply drop right down. Either way, it’s out of reach. Newt lets out a frustrated huff of air.

Hermann wordlessly hands him his own notebook. 

“Oh. Thanks,” Newt whispers, and flips through pages of scribbled symbols and words and sketches of inventions, past a rough map - damn, that’s smart, why didn’t he think of that - to a blank page, and starts drawing the dragons. The colorful one’s wings, caught on the net as they are, are hard to fully see but look large and batlike. The dark dragon’s wings, so far as Newt can tell, don’t have as much width but extend farther along the length of its body, tapering in and then out again so that its almost like it has four wings instead of two. 

“That one can fly,” Hermann says. Newt is startled by how closely their lines of thought followed each other. “It obviously can fly. Why is it still here, why hasn’t it simply flown off and abandoned the other one?”

Newt frowns down at the two dragons. That’s a good question. The colorful dragon is lying down comfortably on the ground, not at all in a defensive posture, and the black dragon keeps coming close to it and putting its face up against the first dragon, which the first dragon doesn’t seem to mind at all. He can’t figure out what the black dragon is doing- Until suddenly he does.

“Its trying to cut the net,” he says, astonished. “It wants to help the colorful one. Fuck. I think they’re like...friends. Or at least working together.” 

“What?” Hermann leans forward an inch more of the ledge, and Newt resists the urge to grab the back of his shirt to ensure he doesn’t fall. It seems like the dragons wouldn’t hurt him anyway. Although he might hurt himself, or not be able to get back up. But he’d definitely get pissed if Newt grabbed him. “You’re right,” Hermann whispers. “But-”

He abruptly stands up, and walks several paces away. Newt twists around in time to see him bending over to pick up the knife. Newt’s heart jumps into his throat. He’d thought they were past this-

“Don’t look so panicked, Newton,” he says sharply. “I’m not planning anything stupid. I just think you should go cut that dragon free.”

Newt stares at him. “What?”

“I’d do it myself, but-” He gestures at his leg. “So it’ll have to be you.”

“You want me to cut it free? But what about being a dragon killer? Proving yourself to your father and all that?”

He turns his face away. “Obviously I am incapable of that. I’m the useless weakling everyone thought, nothing left to prove. Might as well commit to it, eh? Besides, I thought you didn’t want to kill them, and it’s not like we can just leave them here. Someone else from the village might find them, and they might be less peaceably inclined towards people that are more obviously a threat than two scrawny teenagers. It’d be our fault - _my_ fault - if someone got hurt due to that. Setting it free is the most reasonable choice.”

Newt doesn’t know what to say to that. It’s a lot to take in. “Hermann,” he starts to say, rather helplessly. 

“Look, if you don’t want to do it then I’ll try it myself!” he snaps. “But it’s-”

“I’ll do it!” Newt says hastily, jumping to his feet. “Give me the damn knife!” 

Hermann hands it over, saying as he does, “You better not lose that, my father would kill me.” 

He rolls his eyes and retorts, “I won’t!” and turns back to the cliff, considering the best way to get down. Their argument was loud enough that both dragons are watching them, but, again, not in a threatening way. They cock their heads identically to stare at the two boys. 

Getting down is a little harder than getting up, partially because Newt isn’t motivated by terror like he was on the way up, and partially because he went up so quickly before that he ripped up his hands, and now the skin is tender. He jumps off about a meter above the ground, jarring his ankles on the ground, but he ignores that in favor of immediately turning to face the dragons.

They seem bigger now, especially the black one, which had moved past him too quickly before for him to properly judge its size. It was ignoring him then, but it sure as Hel isn’t doing that now. It has narrowed its eyes - an almost metallic silver - and arched up its back, the air of curiosity vanishing. It extends its neck toward him and emits a hissing sound, surprisingly similar to a cat, except far louder. Newt suddenly finds it hard to breathe, and backs up until he is pressed against the cliff wall. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe before was a fluke. _Dragons always go for the kill_.

But it doesn’t come toward him, just stays where it is by the side of the colorful dragon. That one is now making a low, soft rumble, and the black dragon slowly lowers its arched back. There is a soft _snick_ that it takes Newt’s terrified brain several seconds to realize is the sound of its claws retracting. 

The colorful dragon walks toward him. Its hardly different from the first time, but now he is far more frightened. Maybe its just the black dragon behind it staring at Newt with slitted silver eyes and fangs in sight. Still, when the creature stops before him, he again shakingly holds out a hand, and, again, the beast butts its head forward until his hand is on the snout. So warm. 

“Okay. Okay. You aren’t going to hurt me. I won’t hurt you. Okay. Hold still,” he murmurs, half to soothe himself. Then he pulls out the knife.

The black dragon immediately starts hissing again. Newt holds very still, gripping the knife loosely, until the hissing trails off. But the claws are out again. 

“I promise I won’t hurt you,” he whispers, and slowly steps around the edge of it until he can grab hold of one of the lines of the net. He moves the hand holding the knife closer to the net by slow increments, muttering soothing nonsense the whole while, and starts sawing away at the net. “Please don’t move,” he says several times. He has no doubt that if he accidentally hurts the dragon, he’ll be dead in a second, and probably Hermann too.

The rope he is cutting splits in two, but to his horror, that only partially undoes the net. He has to saw apart two more lines with wildly shaking hands until it’s ripped apart enough for him to pull away the net away entirely. 

“There you go,” he says, and dares to pat the side of the dragon. It twists its neck to look at him, and the ripped apart net with a startled squeak. It wriggles its rump. Then it unfurls the full width of its wings, which are fucking massive, the displaced air alone nearly knocking him over.

Newt blasphemously invokes the name of several gods, his heart stopping dead in his chest, and scrambles up the cliff wall almost as fast as before. “Okay, home, now, before they decide to eat us after all,” he pants at Hermann, and promptly collapses to the ground on jelly legs. 

~~*~~

The sun is sitting on the horizon by the time they make it back to the village. They ended up staying nearly an hour longer to watch the dragons, and then it took them longer to walk back then to get there. They are both stumbling with exhaustion after the emotional rigors of the day. Hermann’s bad leg has gone stiff, and the cut on his shoulder stings relentlessly. Everytime he trips or moves his shoulder weirdly, he can feel the half-formed scab rip and the wound start to bleed again. With his leg, it’ll get infected and he’ll get horribly sick and probably have to have his arm amputated. 

They stop, breathing hard, at the place where they have to part to get to their respective homes. Hermann can feel all the words they should say hanging between them. Probably, “you were right,” and “what should we do,” and on and on. He stares into Newt’s dirty, tired, freckled face, and doesn’t say anything. 

At last, Newt offers up, “See you tomorrow?”

Yes. Tomorrow is better. Obviously they need to talk about this. He nods slowly, and they part ways. 

At the door to his house, it occurs to Hermann that he has been gone for hours and is covered in dirt and probably blood too. If Lars is home, he’ll be in trouble. Again. But he is simply too tired to worry about that, so after a tiny hesitation, he pushes the door open.

He’s lucky. Only his sister is home. She pretends to ignore him at first, then stares at him, astonished, when she notices how much of a mess he is. But he can brush off her concerns before she has any choice to voice them by saying, “I’m being punished, remember? Silent treatment,” and shuts himself into their bedroom and ignores her knocking. By the time she gives up on knocking and simply comes in without permission, his (probably ruined) clothes are on the floor and he is a motionless huddle under the blankets on his bed. 

He can hear her sigh. Then the sound of her walking away, and the door shutting again. 

It takes him a long time to fall asleep. He lies curled up on his bed, trembling again, listening to the sounds of the house - Dietrich and Lars coming home late, Lars asking after him, Karla saying only, “He’s already asleep,” the three eating dinner, then going to bed themselves, and everything slowly going quieter and quieter - and remembers again and again the events of the day.

Silver eyes, staring into his own. The sudden rough warmth on his face when it licked him. Weight holding him down. The sharpness of its claws. Silver eyes.

And Newt touching the colorful one. The vastness of its wings. The moments where he truly thought it was going to kill Newt. 

After Newt cut that one free, they waited together at the top of the cliff to see what it would do. At first, just because Newt wasn’t really in any shape to walk. Then, after he recovered, they stayed longer because the dragons weren’t acting how they expected.

Hermann thought that as soon as Newt cut that one free, it would fly away, and so would the black one. And indeed, almost the first thing it did once the net was gone was spread out its huge, vibrant wings. But not fully; it only half unfurled the right wing and when it tried to reach it out the rest of the way, it made a high, moaning sort of sound. Like it was in pain, maybe. The black dragon came over to it and nosed at its wing, and it flinched away and made the sound again. It didn’t even try to fly away, so neither did the black one.

Newt and Hermann watched for about an hour, but although it tried to unfold its wings repeatedly, it never succeeded fully, and it didn’t fly away. Eventually the two boys realized that if they stayed much longer, they’d get stuck here after dark, and decided the dragons would do whatever they were going to do regardless of whether they were watching, so it was best for them to leave. Especially considering that the dragons trying to kill them didn’t seem to be entirely impossible, what with the way the dragons kept glancing up at them. 

Hermann can’t shake a feeling of fear. He tries to tell himself that the colorful dragon probably just needed time to stretch or so on, and that they will have both flown off to wherever they go by now. Life will go back to normal. No one ever needs to know this happened. In fact, things will probably be better, now that he _knows_ that...that he is a person that can’t kill a dragon. 

He’s useless after all, just like his father has always thought. Now he knows. It’s good. He doesn’t have to try and be something he isn’t. The next round of dragon training is coming up, the one that is supposed to be for the kids in their age group, and now he doesn’t have to mind that he will undoubtedly be excluded from that. It’s good. It’s definitely a good thing that he knows. It shouldn’t make him feel all hollow inside, because it’s _good_ to know how useless he is. 

He sniffs and swipes at his face. His eyes are just watering because his shoulder hurts. That’s all. 

Damn it all, why can’t he stop feeling so nervous and go to sleep? It’s almost like he forgot something. It’s more than just having left the dragons there where they could be a danger. But what else could it be? He brought back his notebook, his cane, his-

He sits bolt upright in bed, looking wildly around the moonlit room in horror. No. He didn’t. Surely not.

His clothes are still in a pile on the floor. He doesn’t normally leave things lying around like that, but he was too tired today. He’s glad of it now, it makes it easy to lean over and rifle through everything to find his belt. The normal things are attached to it but the one important thing, the thing he really needs- Is not there. 

“No, no, c’mon,” he whispers, then claps a hand over his mouth and looks over at the bed on the other side of the room. His sister is a lump there that, fortunately, doesn’t move. 

He’s quieter after that, suppressing a curse when he stands up and his right leg immediately wants to give way. He supports himself on the wall and dresses hastily in the dark. He grabs his cane but doesn’t use it yet. Too loud. He keeps leaning on the wall to help himself over to the window, cracks it open just wide enough, and swings out, careful to only put weight on his left leg. Then he’s out. It’s good Newt’s house is so nearby.

He still remembers which room is Newt’s. Of course he does. He presses his face up against the precious glass, peering in. Newt is asleep, damn him. Hermann lies awake for hours and Newt just goes right to sleep. He scowls, then raps on the glass and hisses, “Newton! Wake up!”

No movement.

He knocks again, a little harder. This makes Newt roll over. “Newton! This is important! Now!” If he knocks any harder he’ll break the glass- But Newt is sitting up at last, squinting toward the window. Hermann can see his mouth open up in a surprised circle when he sees Hermann there.

The window is open a second later. “Herms? What the hell-”

“The knife!”

“Wha?”

“You dropped it! In the valley- You dropped my father’s knife, and it’s still there! We have to go back!” 

“What?”

He scowls and repeats the words slower, as Newt clearly intends to be an idiot. “We left my father’s knife. We have to go get it. If we leave now, we can easily make it back before dawn-”

“What- Hermann, no,” Newt says. 

“No?” he repeats furiously. “This is important!”

“ _I’m_ not trekking into the woods in the middle of the night for a _knife_!"

He feels stupid, suddenly. Right, of course. It’s not Newt’s knife, why on earth would he come along? There’s no reason at all. He’d just assumed- He hadn’t thought. 

He isn’t really sure that he can climb down to the base of the cliff and back up alone, but he’ll just have to figure that out, won’t he?

“Right, sorry,” he says stiffly. “I’ll just go alone-”

“No!” Newt yelps before Hermann can walk away. “No,” he says more quietly, glancing nervously over his shoulder, presumably listening to see if his outburst woke his dad up. “I’m not going to let you go wandering alone in the woods full of dragons in the middle of the night. We’ll go tomorrow, okay?”

Tomorrow? Newton, this is really important!” 

“It’s not happening.”

“Why not?”

Newt sighs, and braces his arms up against the window, leaning out toward Hermann. “You came here from your house, right? It’s like a five second walk, but you used your cane.”

He flushes and takes a step back. He did, and it’s true that normally he wouldn’t bother using it for day to day things or a short walk like this, but...he’s stiff. 

Newt shakes his head. “There’s no way you can walk there _and_ back,” he says, not unkindly. “And we’re both really tired. And the longer we wait, the less likely it is that the dragons will be there, right? It can wait, Herms. It’s better we go tomorrow. Afternoon.”

Hermann bites his lip. His dad will honestly kill him if he finds the knife is missing. But...it’s not so very likely that he’ll even look for it in the next few days. And he is fairly exhausted. “Fine,” he says, looking down at the ground. 

“Okay. Cool. Um, why don’t you come over here tomorrow? We can go then.”

“Yes, all right,” he agrees, weariness creeping in past the adrenaline that had propelled him out bed moments ago.

“Good night, then,” Newt says. “Get some sleep.” 

“Good night,” he murmurs, and turns back to his house, sighing at the thought of having to break in once again.


	4. In which Hermann makes a friend

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It has been mentioned to me that the wings of the black dragon are a little hard to imagine, and I'm not sure how to explain it better (b/c I'm a hack writer) so I posted a very bad drawing of it on my tumblr, [here](http://tsundere-scientists.tumblr.com/post/89925392226/chapter-4-of-awake-in-the-sky-has-been-put-up).

It’s been cloudy and rainy the past few days, which is probably why the effects of the fire weren’t as severe in the last dragon attack. That feels like forever ago now, but it was actually only three nights. Today dawns bright and clear. By the time noon is approaching, it’s properly hot. Newt isn’t looking forward to going for a mile-some hike in this heat, but maybe it’ll be cooler in the shade of the trees. Right now he’s sitting at the table in the front room of his house, absentmindedly staring out the open front door as he keeps his hands busy with repairing some worn out clothes. If anyone asks, the door is open for a breeze. But really, he is waiting for Hermann. He should be coming soon. Newt is more excited than he perhaps ought to be. 

It’s the dragons, of course. He can’t stop thinking about them, particularly the more colorful one. It had wide flat feet, and those strange face fronds. The feet are what he’s used to seeing on the newts (lowercase “n”) in the creeks around the village, and the face fronds remind him of a drawing in a book his mother had brought him from a trading trip. The book was from the far south, apparently. He couldn’t read much of it, except for where someone from this area had added annotations in their alphabet. But even much of that was incomprehensible; the writer seemed to speak some strange dialect of the language Newt is familiar with. But the text wasn’t what was important; what mattered was the drawings. Pictures of strange and exotic creatures from far away lands, like nothing he could have ever imagined. It’s one of his greatest treasures. And one of the animals in it, with a label that was readable but nonsensical, was a small, lizard-like creature drawn in a pool of water that had appendages on its face like the dragon. The label read “axolotl.” The name of the creature, he supposes. The word sounds strange in his mouth. He whispers it thoughtfully under his breath. 

The sound of footsteps on the path outside him jars him from his daydreams. He sits up straighter and refocuses on the view beyond the door, expecting to see Hermann walking up. He’s a little early - it still isn’t even noon - but Newt is going to say, “You’re late,” just to annoy him. 

Then he looks properly at the approaching figure and realizes it isn’t Hermann at all. It’s Newt’s mother, petite and still beautiful and with a sword sheathed at her hip.

Newt’s father and uncle may help defend the village when it is attacked, but they are not actually warriors. Newt’s father, Jacob, is a musician. He performs at all the festivals as well as performing a variety of other tasks, such as being in charge of remembering all the important tales and legends and passing them on to the children of the village. Fighting is simply something he has to do, something everyone in the village has to do. 

Monica also has a musical turn, with a particularly beautiful voice that Newt unfortunately did not inherit (which is a shame, because it would have utterly guaranteed he inherit his father’s position. Newt’s talent with instruments is probably enough to make sure he will, but having his mother’s voice would have made it certain). She loves to tell stories, and make up new ones, and songs as well. But she is also inherently a fighter, renowned for her fierceness despite her small size. She stopped fighting for a while when Newt was a child, and...it was obvious she hated that. As soon as he began to be old enough to take care of himself, she started going off on raids, staying away longer and longer, until one day when Newt was eleven and Jacob told her she shouldn’t come back anymore. She’s lived separately from them ever since. It didn’t make so much of a difference as you might expect. She still visits a lot, and she wasn’t ever that cut out for motherhood that much anyway. 

(Newt can remember an incident when Hermann had ended up staying with them again because Lars was gone and he was sick again. When Lars came home at last after weeks of being gone, Newt overheard Monica and Lars arguing. She had said, “You could at least try being a parent to the boy-” and Lars had sneered, “As if you have any right to talk.”)

Newt scowls as she ducks through the doorway. “What do you want?” he snaps. 

She ignores his rude greeting, as is her way. “Hello, darling. How are you today?”

“Fine. Busy. Super busy. Doing important things. What d’you want?”

“Oh, Newton, why do you always assume I want something?” she says, sitting down across from him.

Newt stares at her pointedly. “Because you always want something.”

“That’s not true,” she protests, then hesitates and says, “Although I _am_ here because I want to talk to you about something.”

“I knew it,” Newt mutters. “What is it now?”

She folds her hands, small and pretty and covered in small scars, on the table top. “I’m sure you noticed that most of the warriors and so on of the village were out of sight all of yesterday afternoon.”

Newt was far too busy noticing dragons to notice _that_ , but he nods and says gamely, “Yeah, of course.” 

“After that last attack, we’ve decided…” She takes a deep breath, as if to brace herself to deliver difficult news.

Newt rolls his eyes. “Another trip to find the dragon’s nest?”

She nods. “I’ll be going.”

“Those trips never find anything,” Newt mutters. “Half of them don’t even come back.” 

“So do you advise we just give up, darling?” she asks, eyebrows raised. “Let the dragons eat us, shall we? They’ve been more aggressive lately, I’m sure it’ll happen quickly-”

“No, of course not, but maybe we should try something new, for once-” 

She interrupts him. She’s heard it all before anyway. This is a familiar argument. “Your father and I were talking-”

“For once-”

“-And we think you should join the training lessons that start soon.”

Newt sits up straight, mouth dropping open. “The training- As in, dragon training?”

“Yes.”

“What? No! I don’t _want_ to! And I suck anyway!” 

“I’m sure you just need training,” she says brightly, ignoring the first part of what he said. That’s how she always is. She only hears the parts that are convenient for her. 

“Mom!” he says loudly. “I don’t want to! I won’t do it!” 

“This isn’t a discussion,” she says. “You’re going. I know you find the creatures interesting, Newton, and I will admit they are beautiful, but they are monsters-”

Newt can’t decide whether or not to be relieved that this is the precise moment that Hermann shows up. He freezes in the doorway, looking between Newt and his mother with wide eyes. He knows them well enough to be able to recognize when they are arguing. “Ah. Am I...interrupting?” he says nervously. 

It pisses Newt off how quickly his mother reverts to a smile and friendly tone, one hand coming up to pat her perfectly braided hair as she says, “Oh, Hermann, I didn’t see you there-”

“That’s because he literally just got here.”

“You aren’t interrupting at all. I was just telling Newton here how I want him to join the training lessons while the next trip is going on.”

Newt winces for a second, wondering if Hermann will have heard about the newest bullshit quest to find the nest. He gets weird about them sometimes; not that Newt can blame him, considering his dad goes on just about everyone, and his brother too now that he’s old enough, and if they were to die, that would be half of Hermann’s family in one go, and shitty as they can be, Hermann seems to care about them. (Newt, in contrast, is pretty sure that he would be just fine with it if his mother left and didn’t come back.)

But Hermann must have heard of it already, because he disregards that part and to look at Newt and say disbelievingly, “ _You_? Fighting _dragons_?”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Herms,” Newt mumbles. 

“I tried to convince your father to let you join too,” Monica continues, disregarding both of them. “But that man is stubborn as a rock, he wouldn’t listen. I’m sorry.”

Hermann’s reaction is interesting, to say the least. He flinches back when Monica says the first part, and as soon as she is done speaking, he says hastily, “That’s fine. Probably for the best.”

She leans back, startled. “For the best? I thought you’d be disappointed! You’re always trying to convince him! You practically drove him mad this time last year! And he told me about what you and Newton got up to the other day, with that weapon you invented!” She glances at Newt. “That’s partially why I thought this was good. You boys are showing your initiative. And I thought dragon training would channel that more productively. Keep you out of trouble.”

“Hey, I had nothing to do with that, that was all Hermann!” Newt protests. “I have no initiative! Zero! None! At all!” 

“And it didn’t work anyway,” Hermann points out, sounding rather downhearted. “I don’t think...I’m pretty sure I can’t kill a dragon.”

“Sure you can!” Monica says encouragingly.

“I’m fairly positive I cannot,” Hermann says, and the unwelcome image of him sitting on the ground with tears on his face thrusts itself into Newt’s head. 

“You can, dear, you can,” Monica says, entirely missing the tone of his voice. “And one day you will. Both of you will. I believe in you boys. Oh, and I’m so glad to see the two of you are getting along again!”

“We are not!” they say simultaneously. 

Monica chuckles. Newt grits his teeth. She’s so annoying. Hermann is so annoying. This whole damn village is so annoying. 

“Anyway, Mom,” Newt says loudly, standing up. “Hermann and I have...stuff to do. Important, busy, non-friendly stuff. So. We have to go. Now. Right, Herms- Hermann?”

Hermann nods, all business again. “Yes, we really should be going...if that’s all?” Damn his politeness. 

“Yes, yes,” she says, waving her hand. “Training starts in two days. You should enjoy your last few days of freedom, Newton. Have fun. It was so nice to see you again, Hermann, it feels like it’s been forever.” 

“Oh, yes, I suppose,” he says vaguely as Newt edges around the room toward him, then, “Um, well, bye,” when Newt reaches him and they both escape the house. Monica follows not long after, so by silent agreement they wander vaguely around as if they aren’t going anywhere particular - certainly not sneaking off to the woods, no, of course not - until she is out of sight. Then they beeline toward the forest. 

“Training, hm?” Hermann says.

“I don’t wanna fucking go,” Newt snaps. “And don’t give me your shit about how you’d love to go-”

“I don’t want to either,” he says shortly. “Not anymore. I’ve clearly proven I can’t do it, so going to training would just get me hurt or killed like my dad expects.”

The best Newt can manage is an awkward, “Oh.” 

Hermann adds, a little meanly, “But good luck to you.”

“I’m gonna die,” Newt says gloomily. 

Hermann dismisses this with a somewhat meaner, “Ah well, these things happen.”

Yeah, they definitely don’t get along. And aren’t friends. Why does everyone assume they are?

~~*~~

Hermann doesn’t care about the latest trip. Or that Lars and Dietrich are going. Or that Karla is really pissed that she isn’t allowed to go and is definitely determined to try and persuade Lars in the next few days that she should be able to go and that she really might get her way. (Karla usually does, and she’s eighteen now, officially of age.) He doesn’t care that if all three go, he’ll be left all alone here for the next several weeks, and that if they die, he’ll be left all alone forever. Whatever. And that Newt is going to be starting dragon training and Hermann won’t be, that’s also just fine. Herc Hansen is running the sessions this year - his wife is making him stay to help care for their young son, and Angela is not the sort of woman you say “no” to - and he’s perfectly capable, he won’t let anyone get hurt. Nothing will happen to Newt. Not that he cares if it does.

He does mind a little that Monica tried to persuade Lars to let Hermann join the lessons. It’s true that he’s wanted to for years. The lessons take place roughly every two or so years over the summer months, attended usually by five to fifteen teens all roughly around the same age. Hermann is right on the edge of what the people in the town usually call the age groups. He could either be the youngest of the next group up, or the oldest of the next one down, the one that includes Newt. Last year he tried desperately to convince his father to let him join that age group’s lessons, only giving up after his father rather ferociously lost his temper at him. 

He wanted to attend so badly last year. He’d wanted to attend this year as well. In fact, he had been hoping a little bit that he could prove, with the help of his weapon, that he could kill a dragon, and that then his father would permit him to attend the lessons. But now...he’s conflicted. He’s wanted to take part in the lessons for so long that the desire feels almost ingrained in him. He’s read the books and watched the lessons and knows all of the theory. But apparently, despite all that, he can’t kill a dragon. Training won’t alter the fact that he isn’t _capable_ of it. So despite how long he has wanted this, it’s better that he can’t have it.

It’s frightening to think that his father’s mind might have been changed on this topic if Monica’s persuasion had worked. How awful to have discovered dragon training would be a bad match for him only to at last be allowed to do it. He might have been forced to prove before the whole village that he really can’t fight, just as everyone has long suspected. He supposes he’s lucky to have escaped that; he doesn’t feel lucky. 

As well as that...his father was extremely bad tempered this morning. The silent treatment meant that Lars only spoke to him to mention the trip, and Hermann had actually been grateful for that considering how short Lars was to Dietrich and Karla. Monica speaking to Lars about Hermann joining the training sessions definitely would have seemed like unwelcome interference to him and was probably the source of Lars’s bad mood. Lars is normally a very cool-headed man, but Monica is one of the few people in Shatter with the ability to get under his skin. (Newt and his mother could both get under anyone’s skin.) And once he loses his temper, it tends to stay lost for several days. 

Hermann presses his mouth into a thin line and glares into the woods. The next few weeks are just going to be absolutely delightful. Lars will be angry until he leaves, and his bad moods always fill up the house. Then he’ll go, and Hermann will either be left alone or stuck at home with his angry sister, in the house that always seems too empty, nothing to do other than the same old everyday chores, pretending that he isn’t worrying about his family. (He won’t worry. They’ll be fine.) At least Newt will get to almost get himself killed in dragon training. It won’t be fun, but it’ll be better than nothing. 

What is Hermann supposed to do with his life now? He’s spent the last few years determined to invent weapons that will help him kill dragons and revolutionize fighting. He’s never planned for anything else. All he can do is…sit around and do chores and be useless and get old and die alone.

Newt must be able to sense that he is in a bad mood, because, although he doesn’t stay silent - he’s incapable of it - he mostly restricts himself to harmless remarks on the plants and wildlife they pass, and doesn’t seem to mind when Hermann doesn’t respond. 

The distance to Dragon Valley - it became that in his mind at some point - doesn’t feel as far today as it did last night, but it is far enough that he’s tired again by the time he can see the outcropping that marks the edge of the valley. Of course, it probably doesn’t help that he only managed to sleep for a few hours last night after he returned to his own house from Newton’s and that he is still sore from yesterday’s misadventures. 

Newt stops talking as soon as the outcropping comes into view, and, like yesterday, they both creep quietly along the edge of the divot that must have been formed by the colorful dragon hitting the ground after Hermann knocked it out of the air. Probably the dragons aren’t here anymore. And they didn’t seem to form as much of a threat yesterday as Hermann would have expected. He still doesn’t understand why the two dragons didn’t massacre them. Are they too small to seem like enough of a danger to warrant attack? He had thought dragons were vicious. Merciless. But they spared them, yesterday. So there might not be any need to worry now; yet both boys instinctively go quiet. 

The spot where Newt fell yesterday is still visible, a brown slice of earth amongst the soft green grass that grows up to the edge of the valley. Hermann’s heart is pounding hard as he creeps to the edge to peer over, and it isn’t due to the exertion of the walk. He has to take a deep breath before he can bring himself to look down into the valley. 

Everything is the same as yesterday. The stunted trees. The green grass. The glass-flat pond. And the brightly colored dragon lying next to it. The only difference is that now it isn’t encumbered by the net. 

“Why is it still here?” Newt whispers. “And where is the other one?”

Hermann shakes his head. “No idea.” If he could fly away...he certainly would. 

It’s hard to tear his eyes away from the dragon. He managed, somehow, in the time since he saw it last, to forget just how big and majestic the creature is. But after staring for a long interval, he remembers why they came here in the first place - _not_ to put their lives in danger by exposing themselves to dangerous and mysterious animals - and scan the valley for his father’s knife. It’s exactly where he expected, at the base of the cliff where Newt climbed down yesterday to cut the dragon free of Hermann’s net. Newt’s notebook isn’t far from it. Hermann nudges at Newt’s shoulder - when did he get so close? - and points at both objects. 

“Oh, hey, my notebook,” Newt says, now at a regular volume. “Cool.”

“Shh!” Hermann hisses, glances frantically at the dragon to see if it heard...which it definitely did. It has jerked its head up to look at both of them. Hermann’s heart rate increases.

“Dude, relax,” Newt says. “He was gonna figure out we were here anyway, when I climbed down there. Probably better to not sneak up on him, right? And he was pretty chill yesterday, I think as long as we don’t make any sudden movements it ought to be okay.”

Hermann has to admit that the dragon doesn’t look particularly threatening - you know, other than the claws and the size and the wide mouth and general _dragon-ness_ of it - sitting there on the valley floor, staring up at them with its head cocked curiously to the side. Still… “At least be careful.”

“Of course, Herms, I’m always careful,” Newt says cheerfully, standing up. Hermann snorts and sits up. He has several childhood scars that would serve to refute that statement. Newt has even more. Newt scowls at him, guessing what he means. “I’ll be careful,” he insists, and turns his back on the cliff so he can start to descend. 

He has only put one foot over the edge before he stops and pulls it back to the top. “Before I forget,” he says, rifling in his pockets. He comes up with more pieces of sheep jerky, and hands some over to Hermann. “These seemed helpful yesterday, so I brought more just in case. You should have some in case the black dragon comes back and is interested in you again.” 

“Oh. Yes. Um. Thank you,” Hermann says weakly. Right. That could happen. 

“I’ll be quick,” Newt promises, and climbs down the cliff. 

Hermann’s heart is in his throat for the whole descent, but Newt climbs down easily and the dragon doesn’t make any moves other than following Newt’s movements with its eyes. Newt picks up his notebook, shoves it into his pocket, has to go a few paces to the side to pick up the knife, and then, being Newton Geiszler and the biggest, most reckless idiot in the world...takes several steps toward the dragon. 

“Newton!” Hermann hisses furiously. 

Newt waves a hand at him without looking. “Just keep cool, Herms,” he calls, and continues advancing toward the dragon. It rises slowly to its feet. 

Hermann misses the rest of what happens, because some small, soft sound catches his attention, jerking his gaze up to the sky. He knows before he sees it that it’ll be the black dragon. Of course it will. That’s just the sort of luck he has. In fitting with his luck, it sees him right away and, like yesterday, swoops down to land at the cliff top. 

But today it doesn’t knock him down. It doesn’t dive bomb him. It gracefully floats down out of the sky to land, perfectly balanced, on the edge of the cliff. Hermann instinctively scrambled back several steps when he saw the dragon coming, so it has space to land between him and the valley edge. 

Then it stands there, unmoving, watching him. 

He can smell it, a warm, clean, smoky scent that comes in with his every gasping inhale. He can feel the heat rising off it. He can see the outline of every small, pebbled scale. That is how close it is. 

It’s like yesterday. There’s two of him. The logical part of him is insisting that this is a deadly monster that murdered much of his family before he could ever even meet them. He has no weapons, and has proven he can’t fight, so he should run. Maybe he wouldn’t get far, but it’s his only choice.

The less logical part is just as terrified, but instead of running, he reaches a shaking hand into his pocket and pulls out the dried meat he shoved there. The dragon sniffs, the pink skin at the edge of its nostrils flaring. Hermann holds out the handful of meat, staring at his hand like it is disconnected from the rest of his body. 

The dragon inches closer and sniffs again, then, very delicately and too quickly for him to react, grabs the tip of the jerky in its long, sharp teeth and yanks it out of his hand. He gasps and jerks his hand back, holding it against his chest, his rapidly fluttering heart. 

The piece of meat is so small compared to the size of the dragon that it swallows almost immediately. The long, thin tongue flicks out to clean its mouth. Hermann finds himself thinking that the creature looks kind of...pleased. It had been standing, but now it settles down on its haunches, the back legs folded underneath it and front legs straight, the long tail wrapping around itself. The position is oddly catlike. Sitting up like this, it is slightly taller than him. It blinks thoughtfully at him and makes a soft, inquisitive crooning noise. 

Okay. Okay. He can do this. Newt did it, so can he. 

He drags his hand away from where it is still resting over his heart, starts to thrust it forward, looks at the huge creature sitting before him, and flinches away. No. No, he can do this. He just- He turns his face away, and then it’s a little easier to hold his hand out toward the dragon. 

The next few seconds last forever. He’s waiting for the heat of the dragon mouth to envelop his wrist, for the agonizing pain as the teeth close around him...but it doesn’t come. After a century of waiting, he feels something soft and warm bump against his palm.

He stands frozen at first, unable to believe what is happening. He turns slowly, mouth falling open at the sight of the dragon, head bowed, eyes closed. Its closer now than it was a few seconds before. It must have moved, but totally silently. 

A soft ticking sound comes from its throat. He swallows hard, clicking his mouth shut, then inches closer. “H-hello,” he stammers, feeling stupid as soon as he says it. Cautiously, he tries moving around the hand on the dragon’s snout, rubbing as he might for a cat or dog. The ticking sound grows louder. “Oh. D’you...like that?”

The big eyes blink open again, pupils lazily dilating. It butts its head closer, leaning into the touch. Hermann breathes “oh” again, and tries rubbing harder, bringing up his other hand to join the first. He unconsciously steps even closer, so that there is hardly any space between them.

The dragon is scaled like a snake with tiny, rounded scales, so evenly fit together that they feel smooth and almost silky. Heat rises from its skin, not unpleasantly. He leans in, curiously examining the scales. Yesterday he had thought the dragon was black, but now that he’s closer, that doesn’t seem right. It was cloudy weather before, so perhaps that was why he didn’t notice, or maybe one just needed to be close enough to notice, but the scales shine in the sunlight with ripples of color. He supposes it’s similar to the coloring of a raven, but the colors are far more vibrant, bright curving lines of blue and green and purple, shimmering in hypnotic ribbons across the dark scales with every movement. It reminds him of...sometimes, at night, when he can’t sleep for whatever reason, he’ll look out at the sky. He’s always liked the stars. And sometimes there will be those vast glowing streaks of colorful light dancing in the sky. The _nordlys_ , northern lights. It always makes him peaceful and strangely glad to see those lights, and this dragon’s iridescence is like that, and the big silver eyes are like twin moons.

“You’re lovely,” he whispers, astonished.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Nordlys_ literally means Northern Lights in Norwegian (according my half-assed internet research, so please feel free to correct me), and I used a non-English word for reasons that will hopefully be clear soon. There is a clip that has the pronunciation [here](http://www.forvo.com/word/nordlys/).


	5. In which there are arguments

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is late! Before I had been posting from stuff I'd already written, but I caught up to that faster than I expected, so now I have to wait to write a chapter before I post it. Also, I have not had consistent laptop access recently and will continue not to for several days, so there will probably, once again, be a bit of a wait for the next chapter. But anyway, here it is one now. 
> 
> Also, some people have drawn wonderful fanart of the two dragons! You can see those [here](http://tsundere-scientists.tumblr.com/post/90122075191/i-tried-to-draw-the-black-dragon-because-hell-yeah#notes), [here](http://gluethegrue.tumblr.com/post/90231787176), and [here](http://gluethegrue.tumblr.com/post/90398790281)! They are really lovely and awesome, thank you so much for drawing them!! (And hey if anyone else ever wants, just let me know, because that is my favorite thing and I will definitely link to them.) (Also if I do link to it and you are not comfortable with that, let me know and I will take it down pronto.)
> 
> Thirdly, just wanted to mention that this chapter has a scene at the end with Lars scolding Hermann and...I dunno, he's kind of harsh, I don't think it's especially hardcore but I figured I would mention it so that it doesn't catch anyone unaware. And, as always, if you think there is something I should be tagging this story with and I'm not doing so, PLEASE let me know, and I will do that! Thank you! Sorry the notes were so long this time, and I'll try to write the next chapter as fast as I can!

It’s not that Newt means to be stupid or reckless or any of the names Hermann is going to hurl at him when he climbs out of the valley. He fully intends, at first, to grab his notebook and Hermann’s knife and get out of there. He’s even plotting how to persuade Hermann that they should stay up on the cliff for a while so that Newt can watch the dragon from a safe distance, sketch it some more in his own notebook, see if he can’t figure out why it hasn’t flown away yet. He’s always wanted an opportunity like to this, to observe a dragon from far but not too far away. The best he’s ever gotten before now is the dragons that attack the village, and that doesn’t really count. Everything is so fast and excited in an attack, and besides, dragons surely behave differently at rest than in action. He’s excited to sit at the top of the cliff and see all that he can see in a semi-controlled environment. 

That is honestly what he is thinking as he scales the cliff down into the valley. But then he is actually down there, and the dragon is following his every movement, and Newt is just as aware of him. He’s so huge, so how does he manage to seem so unthreatening? Maybe it’s the colors. Or the face fronds. 

Why hasn’t he flown away? There isn’t anything holding him here anymore, so why is he still here? Now that Newt’s down here, it seems stupid to at not at least _try_ and figure it out. The dragon is totally friendly - or, well, doesn’t immediately wanna rip him to shreds - so it’s common sense to check it out more closely. 

The dragon waits in a way that is almost patient as he advances across the valley toward it. His tail - long, flaring out at the end - is floating across the surface of the pond and moving back and forth in slow, lazy movements. Newt stops a few paces away and pulls some jerky out of his pocket, every movement carefully deliberate. The dragon sniffs and then lets out a rumble that Newt would swear is pleased when the scent of the meant hits his nostrils. Newt bends over so that he can lightly toss it to land before the dragon.

The meat has barely landed before the dragon has eaten it. 

“You like that?” Newt says encouragingly. “That’s good?” 

The dragon rumbles at him. 

“I’m going to assume that is a good sound,” Newt murmurs and starts advancing again. As soon as he is close enough to touch, the dragon bows his head so that Newt can reach out and rub him. “Definitely a good sound,” Newt says, delighted with himself. And the dragon. 

He devotes what feels like a long while to petting the dragon. The rumble grows louder. Eventually the dragon closes his eyes and drops his head to the ground, resting it neatly on his paws. 

“Okay,” Newt says. “Okay, I’m just going to look at your wings while you are all nice and calm. Find out what that nasty Herms did to you. No worries. Everything is fine.” He inches around the dragon’s side to his wings. 

Gods, but they are huge. They fold up neatly on the dragon’s back - he’s getting kind of tired of just thinking of the dragon as “the dragon” - but even so, he can see how big they must be unfolded. He leans as close as he dares to examine them.

Yesterday, the dragon moaned every time he tried to unfold his wings. Today, he still hasn’t flown away. It isn’t too hard to guess that there might be a connection there. Newt was worrying that perhaps Hermann’s stupid weapon broke one of the dragon’s wings, but he circles the whole of the dragon and carefully inspects each wing, and there’s no visible signs of breakage. He stops before the right wing on his second loop of the dragon and is wondering if he dares to run his hands over it to feel for bumps in the bone when he realizes that he is staring at a darker spot. At first glance, it looks as if the color is just a little different there, but when he leans in and peers closer, he can see that the delicate skin of the wings is discolored in a large mottled spot. A bruise? Now that he thinks of it, he’s pretty sure that is one of the parts that was tangled up in the rope before Newt cut him free. Maybe it was bent wrong, or the rope was too tight. Or maybe he landed on his wing when he was knocked out of the sky. There’s no way to know for sure, but he’s guessing that...

“Is that why you can’t fly?” he says. “Is your wing bruised? It looks nasty...but I think it’ll heal. That’s- That’s good! That’s really good!” 

He steps back, looking over the dragon for any more bruises but seeing none. The dragon lifts his head to look at him curiously, and then drops it back down with a slow yawn. If it’s just a bruise, then there isn’t any need to worry. It’ll heal and the dragon will fly away and no one will need be any the wiser. Newt grins, feeling enormously pleased with himself. Hermann didn’t want him to interact with the dragon, but look what happened as a result! He knew this was a good idea, he could _feel_ it, and now he’s figured out their problem. It isn’t even really a problem, after all. Hermann worried so much yesterday, ranting about how someone would find the dragon and get hurt, but he was wrong, it’s highly unlikely anyone will stumble across the dragon in the next two days before the trip and by the time everyone gets back, the dragon should be healed and gone. That’s excellent, he can’t wait to rub it in Hermann’s face-

At which point it occurs to him that Hermann should probably have been berating him this whole time but he hasn’t heard a sound, let alone the inevitable angry shout. He swallows against a suddenly dry mouth and tilts his head back to look at the top of the cliff where he left Hermann. 

He can’t see Hermann. But he can see the silhouette of the black dragon there. 

“Crap,” he whispers, breath hitching, and turns his back on the colorful dragon without a thought to go racing across the valley to the cliff wall, climbing up it as quickly as he can for the third time in two days. The whole way, he berates himself for leaving Hermann alone. Sure, the black dragon didn’t hurt him yesterday, but it showed itself to be a lot less friendly, and Hermann is way more frightened of the dragons than Newt is - he can have all that bravado about how he just wants to kill one, but Newt knows they scare him - and what if he does - or already _did_ \- something to antagonize the black dragon, or maybe its just even less friendly today, oh no-

He flings himself over the cliff edge, then stops dead to stare at the unexpected sight that meets his eyes. 

Hermann. Standing there. Petting the head of the black dragon. Murmuring away softly to it. 

“What-” Newt gasps breathlessly. 

The dragon stiffens up immediately, arching its back and turning to face him with narrow, fierce eyes. Newt wants to tell Hermann to back up but doesn’t quite dare to speak, and Hermann seems strangely confident there, one hand still resting on the head of the black dragon. 

“You were right, Newton,” Hermann breathes, and normally it would physically pain Hermann to say that but today the words flow out easily. He’s even smiling a little. “They aren’t monsters. She’s rather nice, actually.” 

The dragon loosens up as Hermann speaks, until at last its posture is nearly as relaxed as before. 

“Oh. That’s good,” Newt says stupidly. 

The dragon butts up against Hermann one last time, then, as yesterday, turns around and climbs easily down the cliff wall in a surprisingly fast and graceful movement and runs over to the more colorful one. Newt spares a glance to watch it push its face against the colorful dragon and curl up into a neat little ball at his side, then returns his focus to a still utterly calm Hermann.

“How the fuck did you _do_ that?” Newt says.

“What do you mean?” Hermann asks, slightly irritated now. “I just did what you did yesterday. I think she was curious about me. As soon as I acted friendly, so did she.” He pauses consideringly. “That could explain a lot, maybe they simply respond in kind to humans, so if you are unfriendly, they will be as well, and vice versa…Maybe they’ve been violent for so long because we attacked first and they thought they had to be. But we have no proof of that yet, of course.” 

Newt has the weird desire to say, But I thought it was me. I thought they just liked me. I thought I was _special_ , that this was my special talent, that I could tame dragons and only me. I was special. 

Which is stupid. And bad. Of course. If the dragons will be friendly to anyone, that’s good. That’s what he thought yesterday. What he had thought he was thinking, although apparently he was thinking these stupid thoughts underneath that, so that now, seeing Hermann make friends with one too, he feels weirdly...unspecial. 

“Are you alright?” Hermann asks, frowning. “You look weird.”

“No, I don’t,” Newt responds automatically. “ _You_ look weird.” 

Hermann sighs and rolls his eyes and mutters something that Newt would suspect was “whatever” if this was someone other than Hermann. But Hermann is far too dignified for that, or, at least, thinks of himself as being too dignified. “Anyway,” Hermann says more loudly, “did you get my father’s knife?”

“Oh, yeah, I did,” Newt says, drawing it from his belt.

“Good,” Hermann says, taking it from Newt with a small, relieved smile. He’s only a little grudging when he says, “Thank you.” 

“Whatever,” Newt says pointedly. “More importantly-”

“This is important, my father would kill me if he knew I took this without permission!” Hermann interrupts. He’s said this about fifty times by now. Newt doesn’t quite see what the big deal is. Lars is strict, yeah, okay, but it is just a knife.

“Whatever,” he repeats. “I think I figured out why that dragon hasn’t flown away. You bruised his wing, that’s all. He should be fine in a few days, he just needs to heal.” 

They both look at the two dragons in the valley at the same time. The black dragon looks surprisingly small next to the colorful one even though it is longer. Soft noises are coming from both.

“I’m not sure why the black one is sticking around, though,” Newt says. 

Hermann shrugs. “From the way they are acting, it’s fair to guess they are friends...or whatever counts as friends for dragons. That’s probably why they are sticking together.” 

“Oh, and do friends stick together, Hermann?” Newt asks snidely, and wonders why the hell he’s saying it like that. Or at all. 

He’s just in a weird mood now. Because of Hermann. Which sucks, because he was in a good mood just a little while ago, what with getting to touch the dragon and all, but of course then Hermann had to go and get himself almost killed and then turn out to have not gotten himself almost killed at all. Jerk. 

“What?” Hermann says blankly. “What are you-”

“Nothing, nevermind,” Newt says. “Let’s just go home so you can put the knife back before your dad finds out and massively over reacts, as he is so prone to doing.” 

Hermann hesitates. “Don’t you think we should...talk about this? About what we should do?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well...I mean. Do we tell people? That dragons aren’t how we’ve thought, or at least, not all of them?”

Newt stares at him. He hadn’t even really gotten around to considering that yet. But now that the question has been brought up, the answer seems perfectly obvious. “Of course we do.” 

Hermann uncomfortably shifts his weight, then straightens up and folds his hands into fists. “I don’t think we should. Not yet.” 

“What- _What_? Why not? We could stop the fight right now! We could, we could stop this stupid trip to find the dragon nest, why would we not tell- Because of your dad? What, do you think he’ll be disappointed because you couldn’t kill that dragon, because I’m pretty sure your dad being disappointed in you is way less important than preventing decades of death-”

“No!” Hermann shouts, white with fury. The two dragons below them start at the sound ringing through the trees and echoing off of the walls of the valley. “Of course I don’t think that! How could you even think I would! That isn’t what I’m saying at all!” 

“Then what?” Newt yells back. 

“We shouldn’t tell _yet_! That’s all I said! You never listen to me!” 

“Why in Odin’s name wouldn’t we tell? This could save so many lives-”

“Only if they believe us!” Hermann counters. “Do you really think they will, Newton, honestly, do you believe anyone will think we are telling the truth? Because I don’t! They’d think we were lying, or mad, or they’d believe there really were dragons here but not that they were friendly, and they’d march down here and kill both of them and probably lose lives in the process! And that would be our fault!”

“B-but-”

“We need proof! We need to be able to prove that not all dragons are the way that everyone thinks, and right now we don’t have any proof. And, besides that, just because these two dragons have behaved a certain way towards us does not mean that all dragons will act like that, or even that these ones will continue to do so! It could just be because the one is hurt or something like that. We just don’t know enough right now, we don’t know enough to act.”

Newt scowls, wanting very badly to argue but not being able to find a gap in Hermann’s logic to argue with. It’s true they have no proof that this is typical dragon behavior. But doesn’t Hermann _feel_ it, a gut certainty that they are nowhere near as horrible as people think? Newt may not know that dragons aren’t merciless killers, but nonetheless he _knows_ it. Doesn’t Hermann- No, of course not, Hermann only ever cares about what can be proved. Hermann doesn’t _feel_. 

Newt hunches his shoulders, refusing to entirely give in. “Okay, so what do you wanna do?”

There’s a flash of uncertainty for the first time. “I...We need to learn more. About them. If this sort of behavior really is typical, we need to find that out, and we need to find a way to prove it to everyone. So I think we should...study them. Keep coming out here, maybe, try to interact with them, see how it works out.” 

That makes sense. Newt can’t deny that. He only wants to because he doesn’t want to agree with Hermann on anything. He frowns harder and scuffs a foot on the ground and says, “Yeah. All right. We’ll keep watching them.” 

~~*~~

Hermann doesn’t know why _Newt_ is angry. He knows why he is angry. Newt just accused him of caring more about his father’s opinion than an entire generations-long inter-species war. (A war, might he add, that has taken the life of his mother and everyone in his parent’s village.) Hermann, clearly, has every right to be angry with that arrogant, selfish, rude-

But Newt has no right to be angry. Hermann hasn’t done anything wrong other than point out a far more logical course of action. And, honestly, considering his plan involves spending time observing the creatures that Newt has always loved so much, he would expect Newt to be pleased. Instead, he sulks all the hike home and refuses to say a word, which, for Newt, is quite the feat. Hermann doesn’t speak either, but that’s because by now he has become extremely stiff and sore, every step hurting before they are even half home, and he is far too distracted by pretending to be fine to say anything. 

He stumbles when they break out of the woods and Newt finally looks at him. “I’m fine,” he growls before Newt can say a word. 

Newt rolls his eyes. “You should stay home tomorrow.”

“What- I said I’m fine! Don’t condescend to me!” 

“Your dad and your older brother are leaving the day after tomorrow, possibly never to return-”

“That isn’t funny!”

“-So you should spend tomorrow with them. Besides, your dad is gonna start to notice it if you go wandering off for hours several days in a row. It’s better to wait until he’s gone, he won’t get suspicious that way. I’m pretty sure the dragons will still be there.” 

“Oh, ‘pretty sure,’ that’s really comforting,” Hermann sneers. “And what will you do, are you going to spend the day with your mother or will you sneak off without me?”

“I don’t wanna spend the day with my mom,” Newt mutters. “And no one’s gonna notice if I wander off, no one cares what I do.”

“No, you just disappear into the woods so often that no one notices it anymore,” Hermann snaps. His irritation with Newt is building up like a physical itch under his skin. He wants to grab the idiot by his shoulders and shake him or, or, something like that. “Always running off to look at whatever weird bugs and animals you can find. You could stand to stay in for one day. Or, you know what, fine, I don’t care, go without me, I’ve no interest in going with you anyway.”

“What, now you don’t wanna study the dragons anymore, you were the one just saying we should!”

“I still want to study them, I just don’t want to do it with _you_!” Hermann says, only not shouting because they are near enough to home that he doesn’t want to risk drawing attention, and resolutely turns his back on Newt to walk the rest of the way. Of course, the fact that they live very near to each other and that he’s too tired to walk quickly makes this gesture a lot less meaningful than it could have been. Newt ends up catching up with him after only a few meters and then they sullenly walk the rest of the distance in silence, refusing to look at each other. 

He’s so angry with Newt the rest of the evening that he almost, but not quite, forgets about the knife. But it doesn’t matter; his father is home all evening and Hermann has no chance to return it without being noticed. He’s horrendously fidgety that night between fuming at Newt and worrying about the knife, only going still when he remembers the dragon. 

She was so beautiful. He’s not sure how long he stood there, running his head over the dragon’s head, examining her vibrant colors. He’s not even sure why he’s so certain that the dragon is female. He can’t believe he was so close to a dragon. He can’t believe he touched one. He can’t believe he did all that and is still alive.

He can’t believe that just yesterday, he wanted to kill her. 

Now, it’s as if all the anger and fear he was raised with has been pushed out of him, replaced with something new and curious and strange. He knows it isn’t logical. Logically, one instance of being attacked and not killed and another instance of perceived friendliness should not cancel out years of attacks and death. There is not a person in this village who has not lost a family member to dragon attack. The feeling he has now, that that was all based on misunderstanding and misplaced aggression on either side, that the dragons are not what people are think, that all of them are like what his dragon - no, no, not his - was like today, is simply that, a feeling. There’s no proof. No logic. It is dangerous and reckless to want to go back to Dragon Valley and try to further befriend the two dragons. Normally, Hermann hates to be illogical or reckless. That’s very well for Newton, but not for him. But tonight, whenever his annoyance at Newt or anxiety over the knife fades, he can only think of touching the dragon today and of doing it again. When he falls asleep, he dreams of the Northern Lights and of huge twin moons. 

He’s sore the next day, totally stiff, so he really can’t go sneaking off to the woods as he’d like to do, partially for the sake of spiting Newt and partially because today is the last day of his silent treatment punishment and being in the house when no one will talk to him is really unpleasant. 

Up to this point he’s mostly avoided the punishment by leaving the house every day, so it hasn’t been so bad. Today it’s miserable. The whole house is. Partially because Karla is angry because Lars still won’t let her go on the hunting trip, and Dietrich is smug because he can go and is acting worldly and adult in that way that he has, which is making Karla even angrier, and their bickering is obviously irritating Lars. As well as that, Hermann had to cook breakfast as he’s still on meal duty as part of his punishment, and his terrible cooking is not making anyone feel better. Of course, no one can complain directly to him, so Karla and Dietrich keep making snide, passive aggressive remarks and Lars just glares at his plate. Altogether, there’s an atmosphere in the house Hermann really wishes he could escape, but he can’t, so instead he sits and twitches and hates his siblings and worries his father will notice the missing knife and grimaces at his awful food and wishes someone would talk to him. It seems like the only time he ever wants Karla and Dietrich to talk to him is when they are forbidden to.

Breakfast is normally a quick meal but today seems to drag on forever. Especially considering the bland, burnt nature of the meal Hermann cooked, this is difficult to comprehend. Hermann watches his siblings through narrowed eyes and internally urges them to hurry up. After what feels like hours of Karla and Dietrich arguing - Karla loud and passionate, Dietrich composed and smirking - Lars finally interrupts with an icy, “If you’re quite finished?” which has long been family code for _You_ are _entirely finished_ , or, as Newt likes to put it, _Shut up or I’ll make you shut up_. Karla and Dietrich go silent instantly, breakfast ends by unspoken consensus, and Hermann is left alone to do the cleaning up. He listens tensely for the sound of Lars leaving. He’s bound to. He’s generally in and out of the house on the days approaching a hunting trip, packing up at home and helping to oversee the arrangements for the ship. Apparently there was once a time where the Gottliebs were so new to the village that Lars was not trusted with such important tasks, but it was long enough ago that Hermann can’t remember it. Lars has proven himself several times over and is now a fairly important member of Shatter, with Dietrich and probably Karla likely to follow in his footsteps. 

Hermann will follow in no one’s footsteps, which is not important right now as he can hear his father finally walking out the front door. Hermann abandons the last of the cleaning up on the table - he’ll come back to it - and tries to walk both quickly and casually to his room, thanking all the gods when Karla isn’t there, and then even more quickly and casually heading to the closet where his father keeps all the weapons in the house. 

In Shatter, nearly everyone has some sort of weapon, at the very least a small knife to eat with, and usually a larger knife for defense. (An eating knife is not particularly effective for fending off unexpected dragon attack, although of course there are tales of particularly heroic Vikings managing it. One of Stacker Pentecost’s ancestors famously killed a Monstrous Nightmare armed only with a bread knife and soup bowl.) Some people may keep a sword or battle axe in the home, and there is no house without at least one shield. However, it’s traditional for the majority of weapons and armor to be kept communally in the armory near where the livestock are kept, the idea being when dragons are attacking, it’s more helpful to run toward the attack and grab a weapon on the way than to have to dodge back home for protection. 

This, apparently, was not the way of the village of Gottlieb. There, weapons were personal, not shared amongst the villagefolk. They were often family treasures, heirlooms passed down from parent to child, and a single home would generally hold enough weapons to basically equip all that lived there. There was also a small village armory, so that no one would be left weaponless in an attack, but the home armories were far more prized.

Lars has never really broken the habit of it. Their closet armory is not, apparently, as large as it would have been back in Gottlieb, and the weapons aren’t as personalized and prized as they should be, but still, they do have their very own armory as few other homes in Shatter do. 

The knife is the centerpiece of the collection, oldest and most treasured of all the weapons kept there. Hermann took it despite that, for several reasons. A few are merely practical; the knife is large and sharp, designed for hunting and killing large animals including dragons, but small enough to be easily wielded by someone of his slight build. As well as that, it’s so very precious that it is kept in it’s own small drawer in the closet, which means that it is not immediately noticeable as having gone missing and thus could conceivably be taken for a day or longer without it’s absence being noted. His other reason, however, is a little more sentimental. It’s the one he’s thinking of as he opens the drawer and draws the knife from his belt - he was wearing it on his back so that it would be hidden under his shirt as he moved through the house - and, instead of immediately putting it away, lays the blade flat across his palms so that the inscription carved there catches the light.

 _To Lacy, from Lars_. 

It’s one of the only things that was saved from Gottlieb. It had been his father’s wedding gift to his wife, a knife that had been in Lars’s family for several generations. According to him, there had been someone in the family in every generation to kill a dragon with this blade. More importantly, there is the way that Lacy wielded it before her death. Just once, a few years ago on Hermann’s birthday, Lars had told the story. 

It was shortly after the village of Gottlieb was attacked. Lars, Lacy, Dietrich, and Karla had been adrift on a boat, uncertain of where to go or where they even were. A dragon had descended from the sky to land on the deck of the boat. Lars had attempted to fight it off and been badly wounded, a wound that later became infected and that he still bears the scar of across one arm. It seemed then like all was lost and the dragon would destroy them all; and then Lacy had burst from where she was hiding with the children and had slain the beast with this very knife. 

(“This very knife,” Lars had said, the blade lying across his hands just as Hermann is now holding it, and his eyes had seemed to glitter wetly in the light of the fire. But that was surely just Hermann’s imagination.)

When Hermann took the knife, he had thought...he doesn’t know. That if he killed a dragon with this knife, it would make him truly belong in his family in a way he never has before. The family member in this generation to kill a dragon with this knife. Or maybe that it would avenge his mother’s death. He should want that, right? To avenge her, and all of Gottlieb? 

Lars wants that. Hermann isn’t stupid, he knows that is why his father is so obsessed with these trips to find and destroy the dragon nest. Dragons destroyed his father’s home, so now he wants to destroy theirs. It’s reasonable, Hermann supposes, to want that sort of vengeance. 

However, Hermann can’t seem to feel it. He doesn’t know how to grieve for Gottlieb or for his mother. Both of those things died before he can remember. He is sad that he doesn’t know either of them, but precisely because of that, he cannot be properly sad _for_ them. It’s not truly a loss for him. Shatter is his home, not Gottlieb. 

Wanting to kill a dragon, with this knife even, isn’t about those things for him. He has to admit that to himself. It’s just about making Lars proud. If Hermann killed a dragon with this knife, that would be meaningful to his father. That’s what Hermann wants, not revenge. It’s pathetic, he knows that, but he wants it so terribly. He wants to do something that will make his father proud and will perhaps make the loss of his village and wife a little less painful. 

He can’t ever give that to his father, after all. 

But for the first time, he realizes that there is a possibility he can do something else. Something better, maybe. If Newt is really right, and the dragons aren’t what everyone thinks. If it’s possible to learn how to become friendly with them. If all dragons are as lovely as his dragon. Then they can make peace, they can stop the fighting entirely. No one ever has to die like that again. No one ever has to lose everything the way that Hermann’s father did, no one ever has to be as sad and angry as Lars. That’s something Hermann can do. He doesn’t have to be useless. In fact, this is so much _better_ than what he thought he could do. 

He finds himself smiling at the words on the blade. He doesn’t care if Newt helps him or not, although it occurs to him now that it might be better if Newt does help. Newt knows more about dragons than Hermann does. (And, oh, fine, he cares a little. He doesn’t know why Newt is angry with him and it bothers him and the thought of venturing into the woods alone every day is strangely lonely. That’s stupid. He doesn’t want to care.) But even if he refuses to work with Hermann, still, Hermann is going to do this, he’s going to learn about them, he’s going to find a way to make peace and stop what happened before from ever happening again-

“What in the Gods’ names are you doing?”

Every muscle in his body goes stiff at once. It’s hard to make himself turn around. It doesn’t even occur to him to attempt to hide the knife, so that it’s still on full display when he faces his father, looming over him in that way he has. Lars is always tall, but somehow he gets much larger when he is angry. He must be downright furious right now. 

Lars snatches the blade from Hermann’s hand. “This is not a toy, Hermann! There is no reason for you to even touch it, let alone take it out! What are you doing with it? This had better not be part of another one of your ridiculous schemes!”

A thought occurs to Hermann through the frozen haze that always seizes his head when he manages to properly anger his father. This thought is that Lars does not seem enraged enough for having noticed that the blade has been missing. He somehow finds the nerve to say, “I was only looking at it.” 

He doesn’t like to lie, but lying is an integral part of being Lars’s child. All three of them are excellent at it. Hermann privately thinks he is the best. 

It works in this case too. “You have no reason to do that!” Lars growls, shouldering past Hermann to replace it in it’s drawer and shut that, gentle despite his rage. “You do understand how precious this knife is, don’t you?”

“Of course,” he whispers. 

Lars looks at him in that way he has sometimes. Like he hardly recognizes the person standing before him. And it must be a mistake. This can’t be his son. He wanted a worthy heir, a beefy, heroic boy who would carry on the legacy of his family and village and bring glory to them all, not...all of this. 

“I’m very disappointed in your behavior lately,” Lars says, retreating from anger into the familiar expressionless ice of _I expected more from you, Hermann_. (You wouldn’t think that could be an emotion, but in Lars, it is.) “I think you and I need to have a talk about the way you’ve been acting when I return from this trip.” 

Hermann looks down at his feet. “Yes, sir.”

“I’m going to be very upset if I hear you’ve misbehaved while I’m gone.”

“Yes, sir.”

“No more of your stupid plans or weapons.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Listen to your sister’s orders.”

“Yes, sir.” 

“And I’ve instructed Hansen that you are absolutely not allowed into the training lessons, so don’t even attempt to sneak into that, he certainly won’t permit it.”

Hermann’s voice is barely even audible to himself on this “Yes, sir.” He’s burning with embarrassment. Herc Hansen is a hero. He and his younger brother make one of the most efficient fighting teams in the whole village. And his father actively _told_ him to keep Hermann out, as if Hermann were some stupid, disobedient child? How shameful, how ungodly humiliating. 

“What was that?” Lars says sharply.

Hermann bites the inside of his mouth hard enough to draw blood and repeats, “Yes, sir.” 

Lars nods slowly. “All right then. Now back to your chores.”

“Yes, sir,” Hermann says one last time and is permitted to walk away. Back to his chores.


End file.
